Top 10 Salesforce Winter ’21 Features for Reimagining your Experience Cloud Journey

As is the norm with all feature update releases, Salesforce’s Winter ’21 release is packed with features that add fluidity to workflows and help businesses achieve their goals.

This year, the updates have been on Sales, Service, and Experience Cloud. In this blog, we are taking a quick look at how the latest Salesforce Winter ’21 features will enhance Experience Cloud.

Roundup of the top 10 Salesforce Winter ’21 features for Experience Cloud

Authenticating Users by SMS

One of the best Salesforce Winter ’21 features is – you can allow your external users to use SMS service as an authentication method. There is no need to download any special app. The verification can be as easy as getting a text message.

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience in Performance, Enterprise, Developer, Essential and Unlimited editions.

Printing c Record Details

With this Salesforce Winter ’21 feature, users can click on the printable view button present on the record details and on the record lists within the Lightning experience to create a minimalist and condensed view for printing details.

How: Select the Printable View button from the list or record details.

The fields and columns that are present on the printable view reflect your related list preferences or your page layout.

The printable view supports activities, campaigns, contacts, contracts, cases, opportunities, permission sets, documents, leads, price books, solution profiles, products, and accounts for record lists.

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience in Performance, Essentials, Enterprise, Developer, and Unlimited editions.

Don't forget to check out: All About Account-based Marketing in Salesforce

Managing Pages and URLs

With this new Salesforce Winter ’21 feature, it is much easier to organize and restructure pages and URLs in Experience Builder. The page menu gives users access to pages and URLs for easy navigation and quick edits.

How: Easily navigate to the menu page panel and create a page hierarchy (1) Open the Page Action menu (2), then click Add Subpage.

Click on Page Settings from the Page Action menu to manage page URL and other properties.

The Page hierarchy can be changed by selecting Move Page, and the subpage URL automatically reflects the changes.

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience in Performance, Essentials, Enterprise, Developer, and Unlimited editions and Salesforce Mobile Apps.

Record Detail Pages with Record-Based Criteria

You can now use the audience criteria based on the record fields to have control over what your audience can see on a page. The record criteria have now been moved from the advanced section to the main body of the editor.

Also, the record-based criteria are not limited to only one field type. With Salesforce Winter ’21 features, many fields of common objects can be used for varying the record detail experience.

Here are some of the objects that can be created using record-based criteria:

Product Category
Quote
Custom Objects
Account
Asset
Campaign
Case
Contact
Contract
Lead
Opportunity
Product

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience in Performance, Essentials, Enterprise, Developer, and Unlimited editions.

Article Sharing for High-Volume Community Users

With this Salesforce Winter ’21 feature, the High volume community users can now share knowledge articles and use sharing sets.

How: For sharing articles with the high-volume community users, turn on the standard Salesforce sharing for Knowledge. Then from Setup, find the Knowledge Settings page and Edit. Under Sharing, Settings, enable Use standard Salesforce sharing and click Save.

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities in Performance, Essentials, Enterprise, Developer, and Unlimited editions using Lightning Knowledge.

Build LWC-Based Templates Faster Than Ever

Lightning Web Components is a programming model that has a lightweight template, which supports full customization and delivers exceptional performance. The developer communities can scale and load quickly by using Build Your Own (LWC) template.

How: To use the template, in the Quick Find box, enter your Communities Settings.

Click on Communities Settings, select Enable the Build Your Own (LWC) template, and save changes.

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience in Performance, Enterprise, Developer, and Unlimited editions.

Trusted Site Paths for Lightning Communities

This Salesforce Winter ’21 release addresses the issue of incorrect URL path in the lightning community. But now, users can use the URL path exactly as entered. This change helps in avoiding the issue of a trusted site being unexpectedly blocked.

Reducing Object Permissions

Salesforce is now going to disable the Modify All Data, Delete, Edit, and View All Data object permissions for guest users. With the Winter ’21 release, these permissions are removed to reduce object permissions for guest users created in Winter ’21 and later.

How: If the ‘Reduce Object Permissions for Guest Users’ security alert appears in your organization, then you must act to secure your data. This could mean that your organization’s data is exposed to guest users as you have one or many custom-made or standard objects with Modify All Data, Edit, delete, or View All Data, permissions enabled for guest users.

Salesforce is recommending to check your organization’s permission sets, guest user profiles, and permission set groups so as to ensure that the settings are not enabled for any custom or standard objects.

Where: These changes apply to all the Salesforce instances created before the Winter ’21 release, with one or many custom-made or standard objects.

Check out another amazing blog by DemandBlue here: Top 6 Salesforce Winter ’21 Features to Enhance Your Sales Results for CPQ

Disabling Member Visibility to Guest Users

With the Winter ’21 release, the “Let guest users see other members of this community” setting is disabled by default for all Salesforce organizations that have active communities with one or more than one community created before the Winter ’20 release.

Why: The community setting, “Let guest users see other members of this community,” is disabled because it allows the admin to control guest user’s visibility independently from other community users’ visibility settings.

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience in Performance, Enterprise, Developer, Essential and Unlimited editions.

Personalize Communities

This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature helps you invite customers for a chat in your Salesforce community for more personalized experiences. Within the Experience Builder, you can also add the Code Setting Name property to the Embedded Chat component to load custom JavaScript that appears as a pop-up invitation for visitors.

Where: This Salesforce Winter ’21 feature is available in Lightning communities for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience in Performance, Professional, Essential and Unlimited editions.

These are our top 10 handpicked Salesforce Winter ’21 features of Experience Cloud. That’s all for this post, but stay tuned to get new updates and highlights on the Salesforce Winter ’21 release.