Three times a year, Salesforce introduces updates and features in new releases. The latest release, Summer '24, went live for customers in mid-June. We've picked out five highlights from over 600 pages of release notes:

Set Conditional Visibility for Individual Tabs in Lightning App Builder

This may be the best feature of the whole release for admins who need to build Lightning pages with tab components on them. Until now, you could not used conditional visibility rules to hide individual tabs in a component–the rules applied to the whole tab component. If you needed to show or hide individual tabs, the work arounds were to either build multiple Lightning pages, or to build one page that contained multiple tab sections that were hidden or shown based on criteria.

But now, when you click on a Tab in the Lightning editor, that individual tab gets its own visibility settings. This greatly simplifies Lightning page design, meaning fewer pages and components to maintain.

Automate permissions with User Access Policies

Have you ever wanted to automatically add items like permissions sets or public groups to a user when they're created, or when a package license is applied? In the old days, you might have created a Flow to do this, but the now-generally-available User Access Policies can automate the process for you. Found in Setup, you can automate granting or revoking permission sets, permission set groups, package licenses, group, or queue membership based on automated triggers and user criteria (e.g., only users in a certain Department, or of a certain role). New in the GA release is the ability to specify the order in which overlapping policies are applied.

Note that there is a limit of 200 active User Access Policies per org, so if your org is large you may need to plan ahead to make sure you don't exceed the limit.

Lock or Unlock Records with a new Flow Action

Approval processes have always been able to lock records for editing while users review them, but this feature was previously unavailable in other automation tools. No more! Now, with the Lock Record action, you can both lock and unlock a record so that other users cannot edit it while the Flow is running. This enables automations like locking the record when a change is made to it, and then waiting for an amount of time to pass (say, six hours) before unlocking it. Need to allow certain users to edit the record despite the lock? You can specify the ID of a user, group, queue, or user role that is allowed to edit the record despite the lock.

Automatically create contacts from email and calendar integrations, and auto-enhance Contact records

These items apply to customers using Einstein Activity Capture. EAC can automatically create Contacts based on email or meeting activity with the new ability to auto-create contacts. If you don't want to create Contacts for users, you can instead set Salesforce to suggest their creation; you can also specify the number of times a Contact must appear in email or calendar events before it is created/suggested. To avoid cluttering up standard reports and list views, auto-created contacts don't appear in them–only in custom list views and reports.

For customers who also have Einstein Generative AI, Salesforce can automatically enhance Contact records based on data it takes in from EAC. This feature allows Salesforce to automatically add phone numbers, addresses, titles, seniority levels, departments, and other buyer attributes. To avoid consuming too many AI credits, this feature won't update automatically-created contacts unless they are part of a Buyer Relationship Map.

Salesforce promises that both of these features will be enabled in eligible orgs "soon" after the Summer release.

Check for duplicates before creating records in Flow

The Create Records element now has the ability to search for duplicates based on criteria that you specify before creating a new record. This eliminates multiple steps from your Flow (getting matching records, using a decision element, then creating the record). You can also specify what happens if Salesforce finds a single match or multiple matches–either skip the matches, or update one of the records.