Winter’20 Release Highlights

I have reviewed Winter'20 release notes by salesforce. In case you have not read the whole PDF of Salesforce Winter’20 release notes, summarized some of the need-to-know or cool Winter‘20 features.

1. Add Lightning Web Components as Custom Tabs : Now you can add LWC as a custom tab in lightning experience app and salesforce app.

2. Increase Productivity with Local Development for Lightning Web Components (Beta) : LWC offers local development, now no need to deploy during development and continuously changes, you can see preview on local without publishing.

3. Hitting Apex Limits in Server-Side Actions Is More Predictable : Apex limits in Lightning components are now applied per action. Previously, the Apex limits applied across all the actions batched together in a request.

4. Navigate Users Directly to an App : Now you can create components that link directly to your app and to a specific page in your app.

5. Hide the Default Label for Visualforce Pages in Lightning App Builder : Lightning app builder provides a Show Label option so that you can choose your own to hide the default label.

6. Enforce Field-Level Security in Apex (Beta) : stripInaccessible() security feature provides field level data protection. For example, If the user doesn’t have permission to read the any field of a Contacts object, this example code removes the subquery field before reading the records. The DML operation completes without throwing an exception.

7. Callouts Are Excluded from Long-Running Request Limit : HTTP callout processing time is no longer included when calculating the 5-second limit. Timer paused for the callout and resume it when callout completes.

8. Formula Class in the System Namespace : The new System.Formula class contains the recalculateFormulas method that updates (recalculates) all formula fields on the input sObjects.

9. Community and Portal User Visibility Are Disabled by Default in New Orgs : The Community User Visibility and Portal User Visibility settings are now disabled by default for orgs created in Winter ’20 and later that enable communities or portals. External users in portals and communities can see themselves and are visible to users above them in the role hierarchy. When Community User Visibility is enabled, communities users are visible to all other users in the communities that they are a member of. When Portal User Visibility is enabled, portal users are visible to all other portal users in the same account.

10. Set Up Email Address Confirmations for Lightning Communities : When Lightning Communities external users changed their email address, the email address is updated immediately. For better security, you can now make sure that the user owns the new email address before the update takes effect. Salesforce recommends that you enable email confirmations from the Identity Verification Setup page. For new orgs, email confirmations occur automatically.

11. Use Sharing Rules to Grant Record Access to Guest Users : Control which records you allow guest users without login credentials to access. A guest user sharing rule is a type of criteria-based sharing rule that can grant Read Only access to guest users. It’s the only way that you can share records with unauthenticated users when the Secure guest user record access setting is enabled.

12. Secure Guest Users’ Record Access with a New Setting : Secure the access that unauthenticated guest users have to your org’s data with the Secure guest user record access setting. When enabled, guest users’ org-wide defaults are set to Private for all objects, and you can’t change this access level. You also can’t add guest users to groups or queues or manually share records with them. You can grant record access only with new guest user sharing rules.

13. Make Files on Records Visible to Customers in Communities : Now you can decide which files customers can see on records that you share with customers in your communities. By default, files on records aren’t visible to customers in communities. The new Customer Access switch on a file’s sharing detail page lets you decide when customers can see the file.

14. Remove a File from a Record Without Deleting It Everywhere : Want to remove a file from a record but not delete it from your Salesforce org? Now you can! Previously, a file owner could delete a file from Files home or a record using row-level actions. But this method also removed the file from all records and posts where it was attached. Now you can easily remove the file from a record without also removing it from other records, posts, or Files home.

15. Require Verification When Community Users’ Change Their Email Address : Improve security by requiring external users to confirm their community email address changes. When a community user changes an email address, you can have an email sent to the new address for confirmation. After the user clicks the confirmation link in the message, the address change takes effect. Salesforce recommends that you enable email confirmations to improve security. Sending email confirmations occurs automatically for new communities and new and existing internal users.