It’s that time of year again. Another release is about to hit your Salesforce Org! Here are the top 10 #AwesomeAdmin additions and top 4 Developer additions that I’m excited about!

Admin

Before Save Flows to replace Process Builder

One note I saw during the Salesforce Admins Keynote at Dreamforce, was that “Before Triggers” in Flow was coming. Yet another #AwesomeAdmin weapon to avoid having to resort to Code, now you can fire off a Flow that makes updates before a record is saved to Salesforce. As per the Release Notes, instead of using Process Builder to update a field on a record “Before-save updates in flows accomplish that same goal, but much more quickly because each record doesn’t get saved to the database again. Avoiding that extra save procedure means skipping another round of assignment rules, auto-response rules, workflow rules, and other customizations that take time to execute.”

If I can do the same thing, without code, and do it faster, I’m all for it!

Permission Set Groups

As Salesforce begins the process of rethinking Profiles, I’m excited to see additional capabilities added to Permission Sets. Now I don’t need to combine Permission Sets or assign multiple for certain users, I can just add them all to a Permission Set Group, and assign them once!

Muting Permissions

Along with creating Permission Set Groups, comes the ability to Mute permissions within the group! Note that this won’t remove access if they have it via another Permission Set or their Profile, but it allows for further customization of how to manage permissions!

It will also, however, add to CTA Steve Simpson’s list of ways to manage Salesforce permissions.

URL Hack Buttons

They’re back! After being one of the main reasons people didn’t want to upgrade from Classic to Lightning, URL Hack buttons are back in Salesforce.

JavaScript button converter

Another reason people were sad to leave Classic, no JavaScript buttons. Now there’s a tool to convert them to Lightning Components so you can continue using them in the Lightning Experience!

Turn Off Automatic Report Preview Updates

Did you ever get annoyed that whenever you were building a report, you had to wait until your preview would finish loading? No more! Now you can make all the changes you want and reload the preview on demand. Should make report building even faster!

Filter Reports by Field to Field Comparisons

Another cool new feature in Reports, you can now compare 2 fields to one another as a report filter. This should allow Reports to account for even more use cases!

Unique Values in Report Results

Ever need to resort to the Power of One formula to figure out just how many unique records are being accounted for in your Report? Yet another addition to reports in Spring ‘20, you can now add a Unique Count to your report column.

Don’t go deleting your Power of One formulas just yet though…

Easier App Launcher

I didn’t know how much I needed this until I saw it, now I’m not sure I can live without it! Access your apps and tabs without having to have a whole overlay screen!

In-app Guidance videos

I haven’t yet used the In-App Guidance feature outside of Trailhead, but I’m excited about the possibilities. If I can now provide an instructional video for how to use a feature that shows up whenever a user navigates to a tab, that should hopefully cut down on a lot of support tickets!

Dev

@track is no longer required in LWC

One of the new features to Salesforce in Lightning Web Components were decorators. These properties make it so that when a variable changes, the UI automatically will update to get the changed value. With this update, Salesforce has made it so that the @track decorator is always applied in almost all cases, making creating Lightning Web Components even easier and ensuring that your UI always has up to date data!

LWC Base Components Open Source

Don’t like how a Lightning Web Base Component works? Now you can rebuild it and make it work to your heart’s content! LWC Base Components are now live on Github making it easier than ever for Salesforce Developers to take advantage of Base Components while being able to add to them as well.

Lightning Message Service

This feature is only in Beta, but I love the idea of being able to have a place for all my stuff to talk to each other, rather those things are LWC, Aura Components, or Visualforce pages. Rather than custom building a listener service, I can send things to the Lightning Message Service and have my other components on the page respond accordingly!

LWC Local Dev

Last but certainly not least, I love the idea of being able to quickly iterate on my Web Components without having to update it with the Salesforce org each and every time. Also in Beta, but I can now run localhost on my computer and see my changes immediately!