What is Enhanced Domain Deployment in Salesforce in 2023?

The next edition of My Domain is enhanced domains. With enhanced domains, all URLs in your organization, including those for your Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, Visualforce pages, and content files—contain your company's unique My Domain name. Enhance My Domain URLs don't have instance names, making them simpler for users to remember and more stable when your organization is relocated to another Salesforce instance. The future standard is enhanced domains as they meet the latest browser requirements.  

Availability  

All orgs have enhanced domains accessible. All qualifying organizations formed in Summer '22 or later automatically receive updated domains. Testing in a sandbox before deployment is advised and should be done before the Winter '23 release, starting in August 2022 for sandboxes and October 2022 for production orgs. Enhanced domains affect all application URLs. 

URL Changes

When you enable enhanced domains, all URLs in your organization, including those for Experience Cloud and Salesforce sites, contain your organization's unique My Domain name. Additionally, when your org is transferred to another Salesforce instance, your URLs remain unchanged. For organizations that have installed My Domain with improved domains, here are some sample URL formats. 

Don't forget to check out: What is Enhanced Domain Security in Salesforce in 2023?

 To Enable enhanced domain: 

1. From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter My Domain, and then select My Domain. 
2. Under My Domain Details, select Edit 
3. If more suffixes are available for your org’s My Domain, a suffix dropdown list appears. Enhanced domains can only be enabled for the Standard suffix. 
4. Select Use enhanced domains 
5. Save your changes. 

Enhanced domains provide multiple benefits. 

• Branding: All URLs in your organization, including those for your Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, Visualforce pages, and content files, incorporate your company's unique My Domain name.
• Stability: Without instance names, when your org is relocated to another Salesforce instance, the URLs stay stable.
• Conformity: Enhanced domains adhere to the most recent browser specifications. They specifically stay away from cross-site resources, often known as third-party cookies.

Potential Impact 

Salesforce will activate enhanced domains for you if you don't deploy them in your Salesforce org before the Spring '23 release. Here are some problems that might occur if you don't test and enable enhanced domains before the enforcement date. 

• Users who attempt to access Salesforce through Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, or Visualforce pages may encounter difficulties.
• Some Salesforce-stored embedded content is no longer visible.
• Your data may no longer be accessible to third-party applications.
• Sandbox integrations with single sign-on can go wrong.
• The *.cloudforce.com and *.database.com domain suffixes can cause single sign-on integrations with orgs to fail.

Impact on Salesforce Users 

Salesforce content can be served from several domains if enhanced domains are not used. Some Salesforce content may not be accessible if the user's browser is set to block third-party cookies. For instance, anything saved in your org and accessed via a URL that ends in documentforce.com cannot be loaded on a landing page with the domain name lightning.force.com. Consequently, the issue frequently refers to "cross-domain cookies" or "cross-site cookies." 

Check out another amazing blog by Saurabh here: How to Write a Test Class in Salesforce in 2023?

Limitations

When you enable Service Cloud Voice, Salesforce configures single sign-on to Amazon Connect using your My Domain login URL. This setup is broken if you activate enhanced domains in a sandbox or alter the name or suffix of your organization's My Domain. Voice is consequently blocked.