The Salesforce latest release, Winter '26, went live for customers in early October. With over 800 pages of release notes, it's packed full of new features–here are five that we think will be highly impactful for admins and users:

Screen Flows can now user LWC Local Actions

You can make Screen Flows more dynamic by building and leveraging LWC Local Actions. These actions operate outside the box of your Flow, and allow you to do things like show pop-up "toast" messages or redirect the user to a new page. For example, from an Account page, you can allow the user to create a Contact and immediately redirect them to the created record when the Flow completes.

Field History Tracking now has a centralized setup interface

Field History Tracking has long been an important tool for Admins to monitor changes to important fields, but the UI has been difficult to manage because it required navigating to each individual object in Object Manager. Now, the new interface found in Setup->Field History Tracking allows you to see all objects in a single UI, and also displays information from the data classification fields (e.g. if you've used them to mark data as confidential, or private), making it far easier to identify target fields.

Plan for Einstein Activity Capture data format transition

This item may look familiar–in the Summer 25 release, Salesforce introduced an optional change for EAC called Sync Email as Salesforce Activity. The advantage of this setting is that EAC, when capturing emails, will now store them as Activity records in Salesforce, which means you can use standard reporting and automations like Flow. New in this release–this will no longer be optional. Currently, Salesforce is targeting a June 2026 deadline for all EAC customers to transition to storing email as Activity data. A transition tool is expected to be released in late November, 2025. The biggest impact of this change? Emails will consume storage in Salesforce–so you should begin assessing what impact this will have on your org and thinking about your retention policy for email messages.

Salesforce Optimizer has been retired

If you've used Salesforce Optimizer to check on the health of your org, you may be surprised to discover that it's being retired. Salesforce's explanation is that Optimizer was originally designed to ease the transition to Lightning Experience and, now that that's done, it's no longer needed. If your org has moved to Hyperforce, Optimizer has already been removed. Otherwise, it will be removed before the Spring '26 release. But all is not lost! Salesforce has identified a replacement–an open source AppExchange package called Org Check. Unlike Optimizer, Org Check is still being actively developed. You can install it in your org to pick up many of the checks that Optimizer performed.

Volunteer Management for Nonprofit Cloud is now available

The Summer ’25 Release introduced a Volunteer Management data architecture in Nonprofit Cloud, but it didn't include any UI for users to take advantage of. That changes in Winter '26–Volunteer Management  now includes all the basics you need–including the ability for your volunteers to access and update their profiles in an Experience Cloud portal. You can build Volunteer Initiatives to organize the jobs and shifts that you need to recruit for. Volunteer Management also lets you track the skills or certifications that you need to recruit for. Volunteer Management is included at no extra cost in Enterprise Edition and above.