Experience Cloud Enhancements in the Summer’23 Release

Salesforce has been consistently providing valuable updates and innovations to its platform, and the upcoming Summer ’23 Release is no exception. One of the most notable updates is the enhancements made to the Experience Cloud. This release brings exciting new features and improvements that will help businesses create even more engaging and personalized customer experiences. 

In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into the -Experience Cloud enhancements in Salesforce Summer ’23 Release. We’ll explore the new features and improvements that will help businesses improve customer engagement, streamline operations, and drive more revenue. 

Customizing your LWR sites became even easier with the new Expression-Based Visibility and device-based visibility settings. These features allow you to tailor your site’s content to specific audiences and devices, ensuring a more personalized user experience. Additionally, the latest LWR release boasts a plethora of updated and brand-new components, such as Tabs, Logo, and Knowledge Article.

Aura and LWR Sites

Migrating from Aura sites to Google Analytics 4 is now a seamless process, giving you even more insights into your site’s performance. But that’s not all – the latest LWR release also includes improvements in custom domains, component caching, site navigation, and other areas that will surely increase your site’s productivity and performance.

The Experience Builder got even better with the latest updates that make navigating your site easier and customizing it to your needs. In LWR sites, the Page Structure panel has received an upgrade, making it more readable and easily accessible through keyboard navigation. Additionally, empty components are now easier to locate and select.

Another significant enhancement to LWR sites is the ability for site visitors to search for CRM objects like cases, accounts, leads, and knowledge articles. They can filter and sort their search results, providing a more streamlined experience. You can customize the search page’s labels and the No Results image to match your branding.

The latest updates also include improvements to site redirects, allowing for a more seamless transition for site visitors who have JavaScript disabled. You can set up either a manual or automatic redirect, with the latter checking the visitor’s browser settings to see if JavaScript is disabled. The Search component within the Hero in Aura sites now adheres to accessibility standards by displaying an outline when a visitor clicks on it.

Einstein Scoring for Salesforce PRM now offers AI-powered lead and opportunity scoring. This tool evaluates leads and opportunities based on how well they fit your company’s successful conversion patterns, giving you insights into the quality of your leads and opportunities.

New Components in Experience Builder

Experience Builder now allows dynamic component visibility in your enhanced LWR sites through the Expression-Based Visibility feature, which is now generally available. This feature allows you to show or hide individual components based on a set of conditions, including device type and user object and profile fields. 

With the new Tabs component, you can organize your LWR site pages by adding up to five horizontal or vertical tabs and dropping any content component into a tab region. The List component allows you to add bulleted and numbered lists to your enhanced LWR sites, while the Site Logo component allows you to add your logo to personalize login and registration pages. To use the new Site Logo component, you need to remove the Community Logo and then add the Site Logo to your page. It’s worth noting that the Community Logo is no longer an option for new sites.

You can also fine-tune how your enhanced LWR site appears on different devices by customizing which components are shown or hidden for each device type, as well as tailoring the margins and padding around individual components. Additionally, the Knowledge Article component now allows site visitors to view knowledge articles from their LWR sites, previously only available in Aura sites.

The Actions Bar component has been improved with increased action support, allowing you to show a custom set of Salesforce actions on an object detail page and customize the bar to match your branding. The Record Detail component has also been updated to allow your customers and partners to more easily edit Salesforce records on desktop and mobile, including the ability to edit records inline using a fine pointer device and the option to open a full edit window when selecting a record. Note that some settings may need to be re-entered for this beta feature.

Developer Productivity

Before Summer 2023, it is recommended to migrate your Aura sites to Google Analytics 4 by upgrading the JavaScript library from analytics.js to gtag.js and manually updating the Google Analytics Tracking ID for each site. This is required to continue collecting analytics data for Aura sites after July 1, 2023. 

Additionally, it is advised to use Lightning Web Security (LWS) in Aura sites, which is now generally available and gradually replacing Lightning Locker. LWS affects both Lightning web components and Aura components in Aura sites. In LWR sites, custom Lightning web components can now send branded toast notifications, and a Toast Container module is available to manage a list of toast notification message components. 

Enhanced LWR sites have improved performance for Connect API calls by default, and custom property types and editors can be created for Lightning web components in LWR sites. When deploying an Aura or non-enhanced LWR site using the ExperienceBundle metadata type, custom pages are only supported for objects that are available in Experience Builder. Finally, Headless Identity APIs allow full control of registration and forgotten password experiences in a third-party app while relying on Customer Identity for authentication.

Related Read: Top 7 Features for Salesforce Developers in Summer ’23 Release

Site Performance

Salesforce has introduced new guidance and expanded documentation to assist users in easily setting up and managing custom domains that serve their Experience Cloud site. By implementing this recommended feature, users can provide their customers with a branded experience by serving their Experience Cloud sites on a custom domain that they own. 

The new learning map offers step-by-step guidance on planning, working with DNS and service providers, setting up custom URLs, and maintaining domains. The Domains Setup page now includes improved guidance and warning labels for HTTPS options, and Salesforce validates domain points to users’ org to avoid potential DNS issues.

Experience Cloud now uses the same loading and caching mechanism for Aura sites as Lightning Experience, resulting in improved component caching and site performance. Users can now use dynamic redirect rules in LWR sites (Beta) without coding, and mapping rules can redirect large numbers of similar URLs. 

Salesforce now sends an email notification when you reach 95% of your portal role limit to help you avoid site availability issues. If you hit the limit, you can’t create additional users, but you can increase the number of roles by enabling Account Role Optimization. The Setup Audit Trail now tracks site membership activity, and users receive an email notification when a membership request finishes processing. Additionally, users can improve authorization flow performance with JSON Web Token (JWT)-Based Access Tokens (Beta) by enabling connected apps to issue locally introspectable JWT-based access tokens. Note that JWT-based access tokens are currently not supported for any Salesforce APIs.

Related Read: Commerce Cloud Enhancements – Summer ’23 Release

Summing Up

In conclusion, the enhancements made to the Experience Cloud in the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release offer a wealth of new features and improvements that businesses can use to create even more engaging and personalized customer experiences. With updates to LWR and Aura sites, the Experience Builder, Einstein Scoring, and developer productivity, businesses can streamline their operations, improve customer engagement, and drive more revenue. 

Additionally, new components like Tabs, Logo, and Knowledge Article, as well as device-based visibility settings, provide more opportunities for businesses to tailor their site content to specific audiences and devices. Overall, the Summer ’23 Release represents another significant step forward in Salesforce’s ongoing efforts to improve its platform and help businesses succeed.

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