This year, we have a dedicated team focused on providing the next phase of resources to better cover existing use cases as well as expand into new areas. Based on your feedback, we have simplified our approach and made our resources easier to understand and navigate.

Here is a quick updated resource summary, followed by highlights of the updates we’ve made so far in 2024.

Resources provided with Salesforce Diagrams include:

• Standard Components — consistent / professional design elements along with guidance and best practices
• Salesforce Reference Architectures — visual product documentation and example diagrams published as templates
• Tools & Templates — partnerships with diagramming tools to access components and templates in your tool of choice

2024 Highlights

Diagramming Standards & Guidance

We’ve been working closely with architects in our ecosystem and based on their feedback, we’ve made updates to our guidance that will streamline the process to create Salesforce Diagrams. Check out the links below to dive deeper into these changes.

• How to Build Salesforce Diagrams — new diagram type definition and focus on scope & description
• Standard Components — expanded and clarified best practices with details on how to use our components

Reference Architectures

Our Reference Architecture Gallery utilizes our new clearly defined diagram types in order to better organize and improve navigation to help you more easily find the diagram you’re looking for. We’ve also partnered with collaborators to bring you more diagrams / templates. Check out some of the new ones linked below.

• Architect Keynote (Dreamforce ‘24): featured examples from the light board demos in the Dreamforce ’24 Architect Keynote
• System Landscapes: Data Cloud Marketing Customer 360, Retail System Landscape, System Landscape
• Solution Architectures: Building Forms Decision Guide diagrams / templates
• Interaction Process Flows: examples/templates from the Asynchronous Processing Decision Guide

Data Models

We’ve made updates so you can navigate to the data model you need quickly, find relevant documentation across models/sites, and we’ve given ERDs a dedicated home on our site. Not to mention, we’ve had huge momentum expanding our product coverage for you. Check out the highlights below to dive in.

• New Data Model Gallery — with product filtering, entities included for search, more info links and related diagrams
• We’ve added 12+ new data models in the past 2 months and updated more than 20 models
• See the new / expanded product areas: Data Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Energy & Utilities Cloud, Automotive Cloud, Life Sciences Cloud, Public Sector Solutions, Financial Services Cloud, Health Cloud

Coming soon

• More diagrams/templates
• Additional Partner tooling usability improvements
• More use cases covered with Salesforce Diagrams components

Remember to join us on our upcoming LinkedIn Live where I will speak about all the changes to Salesforce Diagrams and take questions from the community.

Additional Resources

• Recording of Dreamforce ’24 Session A Look at Salesforce Diagrams in Action
• How to Build Salesforce Diagrams

What’s New with Salesforce Diagrams was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dreamforce ’24 was another huge step forward for our amazing community of architects looking to help stakeholders revolutionize their data, AI, and CRM strategies. Since architecture is not (yet) autonomous, our focus was on educating architects through our keynote, hands-on workshops, and theater sessions. Keep reading to learn more and to find out how you can catch up on any of the content you might have missed.

Architect Keynote: The Future is Well-Architected

The Architect Keynote at this year’s Dreamforce emphasized the critical role that architects will play in the era of AI and agents. Host Zayne Turner, Sr. Director Well-Architected & Salesforce Architects, highlighted the amazing contributions of our architect community around the world. More than 700 people attended the keynote in person live in San Francisco, and more than 29,000 people viewed the keynote online.

Product Managers Susannah Plaisted and Tom Leddy brought expert architects from the Salesforce engineering team on-stage to build diagrams (on some pretty cool light boards) that illustrate the technical considerations behind new Salesforce innovations rooted in the Well-Architected principles of Trusted, Easy, and Adaptable. Live diagramming has been a favorite element of the keynote for many attendees.

During the first demo, Srinivas Tirupati, Software Engineering Principal Architect, showed architects how to build trust through data security. He demonstrated how access operates differently in Data Cloud compared to CRM, but also how they co-exist. He also explained how record level access and encryption at rest can exist across both CRM and Data Cloud.

Next, Claire Cheng, VP AI Science & Engineering, showed how architects can safely enable powerful LLMs with their valuable customer data. Retrieval-Augmented Generation is a process that can access both structured and unstructured data from Data Cloud and CRM. She demonstrated how this process makes it easy for users to augment their existing prompt templates with rich customer data.

Finally, Qingqing Liu, Principal Architect Data Cloud, focused on how architects can be more adaptable by using Data Cloud sandboxes. Qingqing walked through the similarities and differences between CRM sandboxes and Data Cloud sandboxes as well as how you can deploy your Data Cloud metadata using Data Kits and Devops Center.

We are profoundly grateful to the engineering team for sharing their knowledge and innovations with architects around the world. If you’d like to share the diagrams you saw in the keynote, you can get a virtual copy of them here.

As the demos were being presented, audience members had the opportunity to submit questions in real-time, via QR codes. After the lightboard demos, a panel that included the experts mentioned above as well as Srinivas Tallapragada, President & Chief Engineering Officer, and Doug Scott, EVP CRM Engineering, addressed several of the submitted questions (Stay tuned to our LinkedIn page over the coming weeks for answers to many of the great questions that we didn’t have time to get to in the keynote).

If you didn’t get a chance to see the keynote live, you can watch it here.

Or if you’re feeling overwhelmed with all the post-Dreamforce content to review you can get the TLDR; version by watching our keynote recap, where architect community members Shelly Sousa, Enterprise Architect at CoBank, Christ Valentin, Technical Architect at Cognizant, and Gillian Reynolds, Enterprise Architect at Slalom and Salesforce CTA, joined Lead Evangelist Justin Piehowski for some post-keynote analysis and innovation breakdown all in less than seven minutes.

Well-Architected Workshops

We know architects don’t come to Dreamforce for fluff. That’s why we once again offered hands-on, Well-Architected workshops for architects and aspiring architects. We covered essential architectural topics, from strategy and incident response to data integrity.

These workshops weren’t lectures or theory sessions. Instead, attendees collaborated in small groups and sketched out solutions in real time on a lightboard.

There were 40 available seats in the Well-Architected Workshop area and nearly every workshop was fully booked. Attendees were often lining up 15 minutes early. We engaged over 800 attendees this year, with many participating in multiple sessions.

The workshop content introduced attendees to newly added features of our Architect products, including Patterns/Anti-Patterns related to Data Cloud and Einstein, the Asynchronous Processing Decision Guide, and the Salesforce Diagramming Framework. Familiarity with these tools provides solid grounding for Salesforce architects in their day-to-day work.

Theater Sessions

Expert architects from across the globe shared their experiences and points of view on stages across the Dreamforce campus. All told, we had 17 theatre sessions with over 4,300 attendees.

Theater sessions included topics such as how Data Cloud can be used to capture data from a website, global compliance laws for architects, and how the Well-Architected Framework is used at Salesforce. Several of the architect theater sessions can be viewed online.

• An Architect’s Toolkit: Essential Resources You Should Know
• AI, Data, and Well-Architected: An Inside Look
• A Look at Salesforce Diagrams in Action
• Assess Implementations for Architectural Maturity

Check out our full playlist to see all of our favorite architect videos from Dreamforce.

Conclusion

At Dreamforce we partnered with experts across Salesforce, and architects across the globe, to share resources and knowledge to prepare you to build healthy solutions with Data Cloud, AI, and CRM. Thank you to everyone who helped us make Dreamforce a success. We’ll continue to promote and evolve our message to our architect community over the next year through TDX, World Tours, our blog and social media channels, and architect workshops. Come along for the ride!

Dreamforce ’24 Architect Track Recap was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Asynchronous processes execute in the background, without users having to wait for them to complete before moving on to other work. They also have higher limits per context and can increase the overall scalability of your system. But asynchronous processes also come with their own limitations and their lack of SLAs can create issues if they aren’t implemented properly.

Today we’re introducing the Architect’s Guide to Asynchronous Processing, which provides details for asynchronous use cases, tool comparisons and information about potential drawbacks. It also provides insights into how asynchronous processes operate behind the scenes within the Salesforce platform and contains downloadable diagrams for a variety of architecture patterns.

How to use this guide

Well-Architected Decision Guides provide information directly from Salesforce product teams that will help you make the best decisions for your organization and to ensure alignment with Salesforce’s strategic direction. You can use them to evaluate trade-offs and potential benefits, choose the right tools for the right tasks, and understand why things work the way they do.

The Architect’s Guide to Asynchronous Processing is divided into four sections:

• Key Takeaways: A summary of key points covered throughout the guide, including preferred tools and implementation approaches.
• Tool Comparisons: Tables containing side-by-side comparisons of Salesforce tools that are relevant to asynchronous processing.
• Architecture Patterns: Examples of business use cases where asynchronous processing is commonly used.
• Additional Information: Recommendations for how to monitor asynchronous processes and alert the appropriate stakeholders in the event of an issue.

See the Guides in Action

Dreamforce ’24 is coming up quickly and I’m going to be speaking about Asynchronous Processing and some of the other topics that are covered in the Decision Guides during sessions that you can check out in person or stream on Salesforce+

• I’ll be speaking with Claire Cheng, VP of Software Engineering about building efficiency into AI-based automations during the Architect Keynote
• I’ll be sharing the latest updates during A Look at What’s New for Decision Guides
• I’ll be teaming up with the rest of the Well-Architected product team to share key resources available to build solutions with Salesforce during An Architect’s Toolkit: Essential Resources you should Know
• If you’ll be attending Dreamforce in person, make sure to check out the Architect’s Guide to Asynchronous Processing where my colleague Jsun and I will be discussing the topics covered in the new guide.

And if you’re looking for more great Dreamforce content, the Salesforce Architects team has put together a curated list of architect-focused sessions. Check out the Architect’s Guide to Dreamforce ‘24 to make sure you don’t miss any of them.

Contributors

Thank you so much to all of the content contributors and technical reviewers who assisted with the creation of this guide:

• Arturo Alvarado
• Chocks Kandasamy
• Himanshu Sharma
• Jeremy Westerman
• Jsun Pe
• Justin Piehowski
• Kelly Zerr
• Kris Harrison
• Marc Braga
• Marissa Lowe
• Nat Wyatt
• Nevea Van Wright
• Raj Advani
• Sean Harp
• Shoby Abdi
• Steve Bobrowski
• Susannah Plaisted
• Tyson Read
• Zayne Turner

Introducing the Architect’s Guide to Asynchronous Processing was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Dreamforce ’24, discover the latest AI innovations, and see how they will exponentially increase human potential and revolutionize how we work. Whether you are planning to attend in-person or tune in on Salesforce+, from September 17–19 you’ll see visionary keynotes, demos, and stories from innovators at the forefront of business.

For architects, we’ll take a deeper look at how you can use the latest technologies alongside Well-Architected best practices to build healthy solutions in the real-world. You’ll have the opportunity to practice designing (and justifying) a variety of solutions with Data + AI + CRM in Well-Architected workshops. You’ll hear thought-provoking technical sessions from experts inside Salesforce & across the ecosystem in the Architect track. And of course, we’ll show you how to make the future Well-Architected in our Architect keynote.

To help you prepare, we’ve compiled a day-by-day list of the sessions most relevant to architects: Architect’s Guide to Dreamforce ’24. Use this guide as your single stop for the best architect content at Dreamforce ’24.

Let’s take a deeper look at what we have in store:

What to expect

We’re planning three days of deep dives, networking and hands-on learning opportunities. Highlights include:

Architect Keynote: The Future is Well-Architected — Discover how to use Salesforce Well-Architected principles to revolutionize your AI, data, and CRM strategies. Preview the latest innovations directly from the people who built them. Register for the keynote now to join us in person on Wednesday at 4:45 pm, PT, or watch the keynote broadcast virtually Thursday at 2 p.m. PT on Salesforce+. You don’t want to miss this.

Salesforce Well-Architected Workshops — Head over to the Well-Architected Workshop area in the Trailblazer Forest for a series of interactive sessions where you’ll get hands-on using Salesforce Well-Architected to dive into real-world scenarios with CRM + Data Cloud. These sessions are led by experts from the Salesforce community and they’ll be great opportunities to network and collaborate with experts and other architects on topics like organizational security, maintainability, and more.

Theater Sessions for Architects — These 20-minute sessions will present overviews of architectural topics, real-world lessons and key considerations for architects. Some theatre session examples include: AI + Data + Well-Architected: An Inside Look (Available on Salesforce+), A Dive into the Data Cloud Data Model, 5 Case Studies: Real-World Wins with Well-Architected, and Assessing Implementations for Architectural Maturity (Available on Salesforce+).

Other highlights

Main Keynote: On Tuesday, September 17, join Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff along with special guests for our newest innovations at the Dreamforce main keynote.

AI Luminaries: Throughout all three days, you’ll have opportunities to attend sessions featuring visionaries, AI experts, and global leaders, including Daniela Amodei, President & Co-Founder of Anthropic; Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD; Vipul Ved Prakash, Founder & CEO, Together AI and more!

True to the Core: On Thursday, September 17, join Salesforce Co-Founder & CTO, Slack, Parker Harris for the annual True to the Core customer forum. Hear product leaders share highlights from our product roadmap and answer your questions live.

Plan your agenda, with our Architect’s Guide to Dreamforce ’24. You’ll find a day-by-day snapshot of key sessions and a complete list of the highest quality content at Dreamforce. Use the guide to minimize guesswork about how to find the best sessions and speakers.

What you can do now

Dreamforce ’24 will be here before you know it! Take these steps to prepare:

• Bookmark our Architect’s Guide to Dreamforce ’24 and use the links in it to bookmark sessions build your perfect Dreamforce agenda.
• Register for the Architect Keynote.
• On September 10, tune into Get Ready for a Well-Architected Dreamforce 2024 on LinkedIn Live
• Dive into our Well-Architected Framework to get ready for the hands-on workshops
• Follow Salesforce Architects on LinkedIn for more updates.
• Curious about what else is in store at Dreamforce? Catch up on what’s ahead for Salesforce Developers , Salesforce Admins, and Salesforce Designers.

Dreamforce ’24 for Architects was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s August and we’re on the road to Dreamforce, which will be held from September 17th to 19th. This month we will be publishing content related to what you can expect from the Salesforce Architects & Well-Architected team at Dreamforce along with updates to decision guides, new blogs on Data Cloud and new data models in the Diagramming framework.

Our blog call for content will open in August, so if you’re interested in writing for the Salesforce Architects blog, make sure to review our submission guidelines and submit your draft before September 30th 2024.

Let’s do a deeper dive into what you can expect in August.

On LinkedIn:

• Dreamforce 2024 for Architects PREVIEW — Join the the Well-Architected & Salesforce Architects team for a look at what’s coming for Architects at Dreamforce 2024. You can watch the conversation on LinkedIn Live on August 20th at 10 AM CDT. Register here.

On the Blog:

• Avoiding Identity Over-Consolidation in Data Cloud — Getting your matching rules right in Data Cloud is a critical part of the identity resolution process. Learn how to avoid over-consolidation and maintain data integrity in your rulesets.
• Are You Mapping Your Data Sources? — Learn how to use the Well-Architected Framework and Salesforce diagrams to map data sources across your enterprise for a more compliant solution.

On architect.salesforce.com:

• Architect’s Guide to Dreamforce ’24 — Plan your agenda with our upcoming Architect’s Guide to Dreamforce ’24. You’ll find a day-by-day snapshot of key sessions and a complete list of the highest quality content at Dreamforce. Use the guide to minimize guesswork about how to find the best sessions and speakers.
• New Building Forms Guide Diagrams — In July we released an updated version of the Building Forms Decision Guide that contains new diagrams covering several integration patterns. In August, we’ll be adding these diagrams to our Template Gallery so you can download your own copies.
• New and Updated Data Models — New Generative AI Audit & Feedback, Health Cloud and Public Sector Solutions data models. Updated Loyalty Cloud data models.

On Trailhead:

• Salesforce Well-Architected is coming to Trailhead! Be one of the first to complete our new badge focusing on the Framework.

What You Can Do Now:

• Tune into our upcoming LinkedIn Live here
• Explore the new patterns for Data Cloud and Generative AI
• Submit to our blog by September 30th 2024
• Follow us on LinkedIn

August 2024 Sneak Peek was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are caveats to consider, however, as IT has the responsibility to ensure that these initiatives scale. The fear of Generative AI sprawl complicates technology planning as every department turns to IT with its specific list of favorite use cases. Considering the caution and hesitation I have seen in rapid, widespread AI adoption, I recommend creating a layered AI strategy that mixes quick and well defined tactical projects in parallel with strategic planning for the next 36 months. The goal is to show value and create excitement in AI adoption, while also reducing the friction in launching initiatives and minimizing technical debt. The result is sustainable, effective AI integration across the enterprise. As an architect, you’re uniquely positioned to lead this strategic balance, ensuring your organization’s AI adoption is both innovative and sustainable.

In the past six months, CEOs have tasked their technical leadership to quickly come up with an action plan to fulfill the CEO’s number one technology priority: AI adoption. More specifically, CEOs want the technology embedded in business processes as noted in this Deloitte CEO survey. There is a problem, however: Initial expectations were very high, and what originally seemed very achievable in a short time frame is now in question. Several factors have contributed to this new emphasis on a more measured pace of change, not the least of which is the fact that Generative AI projects require reliable and accessible data as their foundation.

The future of AI depends on reliable data. With relevant, accessible, and trusted data, AI is practically magical. The reality, however, is that 59% of customers don’t trust companies with their data. Studies done by BCG show clearly the impact of trust on business. In creating their Trust Index, they found that the most trusted companies generate 250% as much value as the average business in the same sector, and that these companies are rewarded with a price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple that is 47% higher. Getting the data required to supercharge business applications with AI into a form that is trusted and actionable is now an imperative.

Tactical vs. strategic AI projects

Insufficient access to actionable customer data is a key hurdle in engineering trust into technology and process design across a business. In an earlier blog post, I looked at the ways in which businesses are experimenting with the ideal balance of ownership and decision making among AI, Generative AI, data, analytics, the CIO, Trust officers, the CISO, and line of business owners (including Sales, Marketing, Service, and eCommerce). AI projects cannot run for long in a vacuum or in silos supported by disparate systems and strategies. Even if there are strong improvements to a few tactical performance metrics, the organization runs the real risk of destabilizing a comprehensive AI strategy meant to achieve four interconnected goals:

• Improve employee experience and performance
• Improve customer experience
• Reduce operational costs through greater efficiency
• Drive growth

One-off tactical AI projects can be positive: Many of them are yielding great results, such as helping salespeople sell better and enabling customer support agents to evolve into brand ambassadors who perform at a higher level. Numerous growth-oriented service organizations are introducing AI-powered next-best actions to augment agent decision-making and achieve a new level of fidelity in customer self-service through personalized and proactive responses. However, without strategic alignment, these successes can lead to fragmented efforts and missed opportunities for broader organizational impact.

Navigating the AI adoption curve

The current challenge is that, to use Gartner terminology, Generative AI for CRM has left the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and entered the “Trough of Disillusionment”.

“Through 2025, at least 30% of GenAI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept (POC) due to poor quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs or unclear business value”.

- The ROI in AI (and how to find it)

A look at the upside is that 70% of Generative AI projects that emerge from a proof of concept (PoC) are succeeding. The insight is that with disciplined planning and testing, AI-powered CRM projects are enabling a complete reimagining of what a business application is.

Organizations that have continued to evolve their CRM strategies by seeing Generative AI as an additive set of technologies will leapfrog the competition. Too many others see the revolution in data and AI as a golden age for IT. It is not a golden age just for IT. Rather, Generative AI also heralds the golden age of CRM business applications.

The reality is that AI technologies are best harnessed to create better outcomes for employees and customers. Enterprise architects who foster tight collaboration between IT and key business units such as marketing, sales, and customer service are already in a better position to leverage advanced technology across the organization. This is because accurate, trusted, and available data is vital to every process that uses Generative AI.

Lowering the barriers to success

A Salesforce survey in 2024 shows that 88% of IT leaders feel they can’t meet AI demand safely. The survey reflects many other recent polls and surveys that list multiple challenges, including the top five:

• AI trust and safety
• Data trapped in legacy systems
• Lack of a data sharing model
• High cost of training Generative AI models
• Integration with business workflows.

Depending on industry and geography, the percentage of IT organizations that believe that their data is ready for a strategic AI program varies widely from as low as 4% to as high as 80%. The question is: Why are some struggling while others succeed? What is getting in the way?

• A missing skill set that blends AI expertise with business insights
• A lack of governance that negotiates the AI program goals with the needs of the lines of business
• A team that is able to prioritize the requests of the multiple constituencies who want Generative AI capabilities with the corporate business objectives
• The corollary of prioritization is introducing an ROI discipline that measures and tracks AI projects and measures new outcomes.
• Cost-benefit review that determines how to allocate funding such that the most critical initiatives advance unhindered.

There is a ready way to cross the chasm and break down the AI paralysis that some IT organizations are feeling. By following a few easy-to-onboard principles and creating a roadmap, there is no need for nervousness that AI is developing too quickly. In fact, it is developing too slowly! It is safe to dive into the deep end of the AI pool once a few lessons are absorbed.

A review of many types of Generative AI projects reveals that of those that make it through the initial PoC stage, the successful standouts have several factors in common. Dependable data is one such factor. Others are the rigors of a security review, oversight by the legal department, the ease with which outcomes can be measured, and the quality of the skills available to the organization.

In addition these factors, creating a comprehensive plan and roadmap is essential. Establishing a data governance framework and investing in training are also critical steps. Refer to the Generative AI Roadmap Template and AI Resource Gallery for help getting started.

Creating excitement for AI in the enterprise

Everyone needs encouragement that Generative AI is truly a differentiator. This is the best way to overcome the disillusionment that arises from tackling the complexities of AI implementation. The bigger vision is profound and needs amplification: Generations of business software were primarily systems of record requiring a steep learning curve. With the emergence of Generative AI, business applications come alive, advising, directing, and augmenting humans in new and exciting ways. Both employees and customers feel empowered with an advisor at their fingertips, often acting proactively on their behalf. For instance, digital agents — autonomous, intelligent agents — work in the background on behalf of customers, revolutionizing the human-to-digital experience in customer service, commerce, marketing, and sales. To outpace the competition, smart businesses will collaborate with partners focused on connecting the business with customers in innovative, AI-powered ways. There has never been a better time for the enterprise architect to lead the charge.

The AI Marathon: Using Quick Wins to Fuel Long-Term Success was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week we released an update to the Building Forms Decision Guide🎉. These enhancements are part of an overall effort to improve usability and make it easier to analyze product tradeoffs. Here’s a look at what’s new.

Updated Product and Roadmap Information

We’ve added updates to the comparison tables for Dynamic Forms, Screen Flow, OmniStudio and Lightning Web Components. There are several new updates throughout the guide. Some of the highlights include:

• Reactive Screen Flows
• Introduction of Progress Indicators
• Support for repeating blocks of data
• Ability to upsert collections of records
• Support for hierarchical data
• Real time user input validation

The roadmaps for all of the products in the guide now correspond to June 2025 predictions.

Usability Enhancements

The guide has been restructured to make it easier to find key information and analyze product tradeoffs. Some of the enhancements you’ll see include:

• New diagrams that provide visual depictions of the architecture related to integrations involving forms, embedding Lightning Web Components into external sites via Lightning Out and more.
• A consolidated list of key takeaways that outline the architectural perspectives for the guide as a whole.
• A new table outlining the decision points associated with each category, along with lists of questions to ask yourself as you compare products and approaches.

Contributors

Thank you so much to our content contributors and technical reviewers:

• Adam White
• Arturo Alvarado
• Elizabeth Martin
• Grisha Lyukshin
• Justin Piehowski
• Kelly Zerr
• Marc Braga
• Marissa Lowe
• Nevea Van Wright
• Sam Reynard
• Shoby Abdi
• Susannah Plaisted
• Zayne Turner

Tell Us What You Think

We can’t wait to here what you think about the latest changes! Take our survey to provide feedback on the updated guide and let us know what you’d like to see next.

July 2024 Building Forms Decision Guide Updates was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Screen Flows are an important part of any implementer’s toolset when building forms within Salesforce. A screen flow is a flow type that requires user interaction as it includes screens, local actions, steps, choices, or dynamic choices. Fundamentally you can use a screen flow to collect data or display data to users.

But like anything built using Well-Architected guidance, ensuring the security of your solution is the first priority. If your Screen Flows are not built with security in mind, you may be unintentionally exposing fields and data. This is especially true when providing an external user access to that screen flow on an Experience Cloud site.

Within the Well-Architected Framework we provide specific guidance to not mix system and user context data operations in the same transaction within any automation. Coupling this guidance with continual evaluation of your org’s security model (profiles, permission sets, field level security) is critical and is a general best practice when embedding flows within external sites on the platform.

In this article we’ll be covering a critical topic of keeping your data secure in Screen Flows — specifically looking at an anti-pattern related to external user permissions, system context mode and several patterns you can introduce when embedding a Screen Flow on an Experience Cloud site. To find a comprehensive list of Patterns and Anti-Patterns take a look at the Well-Architected Pattern & Anti-Pattern Explorer.

How Permissions and the Flow Engine drive the behavior of a Screen Flow

There are two key considerations that can drive the introductions of anti-patterns within your screen flow.

• Screen Flows and Autolaunched flows start by default in user context — the permissions of the running user. When saving a screen flow or autolaunched flow, you can optionally decide to override that context to System — Without Sharing or System Context — With Sharing. This is an easy option to select, and can have further reaching ramifications that will introduce all kinds of anti-patterns into your solution.
• Between flow screens, the flow engine sends results back into the UI, and the components on the screen consume that data and display it to your users. The introduction of features like Reactive Screen Components and our Data Table component have improved the user experience by making more data and processing available without any server calls. In that same token, it means more data will be available in your users’ browsers and also adds an extra element of risk. Malicious actors could go into their browser’s developer tooling to see all of the fields or manipulate them in the client

These considerations introduce the potential for an anti-pattern when you automatically store all fields when overriding flows from user context to system context for external users. Let’s talk about the kind of impact this anti-pattern could have.

Many releases back, the Flow team improved the overall Flow experience by allowing a Flow builder to automatically grab all fields for an object. This fantastic ease of use enhancement made it easier to automatically grab any field you might need downstream in your Flow and prevented errors that would arise when you’d reference a field in your Flow that wasn’t in the data set you retrieved. The flow engine attempts to look at all of the references you make to the Get Records element downstream, then grabs only the fields needed in the Flow.

However, when passing in the results of a Get Records to a Subflow, Invocable Action, or Lightning Component, the Flow engine can’t know what fields are actually needed, since there is no platform-level mechanism to tell the engine what fields are required.

Here is where the Anti-Pattern is introduced.

For screen flows, when the flow engine returns the results back into the UI and they are passed to a component that takes that record collection, like to a Data Table or the new Action Button component, all of the data is present within the browser regardless of whether it is used in the screen flow. This is because, again, Lightning Web Components have no generic way to communicate to Flow what fields are needed, so the Flow engine must retrieve all fields available to the running user when the flow is configured to retrieve all of the fields for the set of records.

This means if you run your flow in system context, perform a Get Records with ‘Automatically store all fields’ enabled, and use that data in a screen component, then all of the the fields and their values are available to be viewed or modified in the browser’s developer tooling regardless of whether those fields are used in the actual screen. To be clear, you cannot directly edit the record itself, only the representation of the record in your browser. What happens to the record is up to you, the flow builder.

Given this case, there are patterns you can introduce into your solution to ensure anti-patterns are avoided.

Secure Patterns to Introduce to Screen Flow For External User Access

When designing your solution with Screen Flows especially with external users, introduce the following patterns into your solution to ensure that the anti-pattern above does not allow a malicious actor to access data when they should not:

Use system context with screen flows sparingly, if at all, with external users

• Plan your external user permission model (especially field-level and record-level security) properly and carefully. Return the absolute minimum amount of information back into your flow if you absolutely need to run in system-context.

Provide subflows elevated access with system context versus using system context within the parent flow only

• Do not elevate your entire screen flow in system context mode. If you need to grant a user access to specific fields, objects, or setup data, perform those actions with subflows that have elevated access. Do not grant access to the elevated subflow to the external user profile.

Specify which fields will be used by Get Records within system context

• Because a Get Records element will return every field that a user has access to when called in a subflow, we recommend being more specific working with Get Records element. Be extremely careful about what fields you query for when putting that data into an externally facing website. As noted above, if a flow is operating in system context and you aren’t specifying fields to return, you could be exposing far more data than intended.
• If you’re executing a system context-enabled subflow to get data, only get what you need in the Get Records element in your subflow. Use the ‘Choose fields and let Salesforce do the rest’ option for those elevated-permission Subflows so that any parent flow that calls it doesn’t retrieve too much data.
• It’s important to note that with this approach, if you try to run a flow and it references a field not specified in the Get Records element, your flow will likely hit an error. Good security practices often come with tradeoffs, and this is certainly a consideration to account for.

Performance Pattern to call out: Specifying fields within Get Records will improve performance by bringing less data from the server

• Not only will the following approach of selecting fields improve the security of your screen flow, but it will also improve performance. Because you are no longer passing potentially massive amounts of data into the client, you’ll also see major improvements from components like Data Table that consume it and output that data.

Do not perform DML on records using record collections as a source

• When configuring a Create, Update, Delete element using the “Use the IDs and all field values from a record or record collection” setting, and that collection is an output from a screen component, you’re essentially allowing a user to insert a value into any field on the record that they have access to, even if it wasn’t a field that was intended for them to edit in the flow. Malicious users could modify the structure of the ‘selectedRows’ output using their browser’s developer tools to modify the fields and values. If you perform an update using a ‘selectedRows’ output (or, in some components, ‘editedRows’), fields you didn’t intend to be edited could be modified by the user if they have the right permissions.
• An example here would be a Data Table that outputs an ‘editedRows’ output. Instead, use the screen component’s record collection output to then create a separate record collection that only contains the fields you expect them to edit.

Best Practice Guidance on Screen Actions in Experience Cloud (In Beta)

Our newest Action Button component is arriving as a Beta in the Summer ’24 release. It allows users to trigger autolaunched flows within the screen and pass the results to components on the same screen to create bigger, more dynamic screen flows. We call these screen actions.

Since the action button is a Lightning Web Component, it operates in the client and gets results from the server. Because of this, every input and output into the action must be available in the browser’s client for it to work, even if they aren’t shown directly on the screen. Knowing this, let’s look at some best practice guidance when working with Action Buttons that trigger Screen Actions:

• Never put sensitive information in the inputs or outputs of a screen action. Instead, put it into the autolaunched flow and don’t mark it as ‘Available for input’ to prevent the information from being viewed. An example anti-pattern would be somebody passing an API key into the input of a screen action that runs an external callout to a secure system. That API key could easily be seen by anybody and those are often critically important to keep confidential.
• Re-run the action button’s autolaunched flow again between screens when you depend on the output of an action. An example of this might be a shipping calculation callout that grabs a total shipping price, then returns the results back into the screen for the user to view. A bad actor could in theory manipulate the results of the action in their browser, and that value would then be saved in the database. To prevent this risk, re-execute the pricing callout between screens and use that action’s results elsewhere in your flow instead.

Wrap Up

Screen Flows are becoming more and more powerful thanks to the advent of reactivity, screen actions, and more data processing capabilities like the new Transform element. As you create bigger, more complex screens, the amount of data present in the browser will also increase. Be mindful of this and plan for malicious actors snooping around the innards of your flows.

Evaluate your external user permissions and use system context sparingly and carefully. Follow the patterns provided in this post to ensure your organization’s data is safe and secure.

Additional Resources

• Data Safety When Running Screen and Autolaunched Flows in System Context
• Building Flows for the Guest User Profile
• Flow security | Are your outputs exposed?
• Reactive Components Trailmix

Building Secure Screen Flows For External User Access was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Data Cloud presents a new and interesting challenge for architects working in the Salesforce ecosystem: How do we consider and design for usage-based products in our solutions? We want to architect the best possible solution for our stakeholders, while making it clear to those same stakeholders that they are getting optimal value from their investment.

According to the Well-Architected framework,“strategy in architecture means systems are thoughtfully planned and delivered. It means delivery and maintenance teams have a clear view of the work to be done today and in the future, and everyone is aligned around the “why” of the work to be done. It means urgent requests can be triaged effectively and efficiently, and stakeholders can clearly understand the impacts and trade-offs of requests.”

This post will walkthrough how to leverage the basics of a well-architected approach to strategy, and apply those principles to credit usage patterns in Data Cloud.

Prioritize the business drivers

The key to making strategic decisions about usage in Data Cloud is starting with an accurate and clear sense of how the business would approach prioritization. This can be tricky at times, but it’s a critical skill for architects that involves measuring value, building trust with stakeholders, and measuring your outcomes.

Start by getting a solid sense of the data. Once you have a clear set of the different business problems Data Cloud can help your organization solve, look at the metrics attached to those functional areas. Measure the potential business value of each use case by attaching KPIs such as revenue generation, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and lifetime value. You can get an idea of how to think about, organize, and measure KPIs by referencing our KPI Spreadsheet Template.

Next, estimate the Data Cloud usage costs associated with each use case around activities like data ingestion, transformation, identity resolution, and segmentation. (Refer to this article from Salesforce Help to better understand Data Cloud Billable Usage types.)

After you gather the data, you need to get a clear understanding of the motivations of different business units in your organization. You need to engage with key stakeholders, including marketing, sales, IT, and finance teams, to gather their perspectives and the unit’s priorities as it relates to usage. You may be surprised at the range of views — the marketing team might prioritize segmentation and activation for targeted campaigns, while the IT team might focus on data ingestion and transformation. Don’t be discouraged, experiencing this tension is a critical step to help you appreciate the complexity of the big picture.

Once you’ve done the calculations and met with your stakeholders, it’s time to assess the different types of benefits that can be tied to your use cases. As an aid, you can use our Data Cloud Usage Prioritization Template to help you capture and prioritize usage of both tangible and intangible benefits in a single sheet.

• Tangible: These are usually measurable, and include benefits like increased sales, improved customer retention, and reduced operational costs
• Intangible: These are usually the harder-to-measure benefits including, enhanced customer experience, reduced internal friction, and better decision-making insight for stakeholders.

Leverage your conversations and calculations to finalize your usage prioritization plan, ensuring it balances immediate high-ROI initiatives with strategic long-term goals. This will enable a more structured and impactful implementation of Data Cloud.

Usage considerations for your roadmap

Now that you have prioritized your business drivers, it’s important to plot out the correct sequencing of the work by putting the work onto a roadmap.

As stated in the Well-Architected framework, a roadmap “aligns every stakeholder about the ‘why’ of work ahead.” When it comes to usage, one “below-the surface” benefit of thoughtful and well-executed roadmaps is that they begin to tell the value story that Data Cloud is bringing to your organization over time.

Roadmaps are often categorized into two styles to support business (feature) and technical audiences (systems). Architects should determine the appropriate granularity for each type of roadmap based on the level of the stakeholder audience within the organization (Check out our Architects’ Guide to Effective Roadmaps).

The technical roadmap should start with foundational features such as initial data ingestion and harmonization. The business roadmap should start by delivering on an initial use cases that shows value quickly and builds stakeholder goodwill, such as segmentation for marketing campaigns or automated reporting. As the roadmaps evolve, you can add more advanced features such as real-time data ingestion and AI capabilities to amplify your gains.

For each feature on the roadmap, note the estimated number of credits that will be used. Tally the total credits used per phase and your roadmap gives you an “at a glance” understanding of credit usage.

In addition to planning for business evolution, capitalizing on growth, and spotting opportunities, business roadmaps provide a way to ensure that IT spend aligns to the overall business vision. Conversely, technical roadmaps help IT stakeholder see the bigger picture and allocate technical budget and resources.

Governance

With Data Cloud it’s more important than ever to ensure that inefficient or inappropriate usages are identified and mitigated, while intentional usage is promoted throughout the process. Managing this is the role of governance.

“Good governance is about making it hard for bad customizations to get past the early stages of development, and getting good customizations into production predictably and consistently” — Salesforce Well-Architected

Here are a few examples of how to build usage considerations into your governance:

• Work requests: When functionality or features are submitted around Data Cloud, have users provide information about usage on the request form.
• Work approvers: Does the approver have a solid understanding of how usage works in Data Cloud, how it’s calculated, how it’s prioritized, and where it fits into the roadmap? Safeguards on usage should be built into the approval process, for example an approver must be required to get written approval from the CFO if the credit usage exceeds the estimate by more than 1 percent.
• Access controls and security: Design access policies and permissions that only allow appropriate users to access high-credit functions in Data Cloud, such as identity resolution and real-time data processing.
• Monitoring and notifications: Your governing body must make a point to regularly check-in on and understand what’s driving credit usage. This can be done through reports, dashboards, notifications, and audit trails.
• ROI calculations: Calculating the ROI for the business as it relates to credits used is paramount for good governance. Using both the tangible and intangible value points outlined above, attach business return generated to each credit that you invested in with Salesforce. The governing body should calculate and review this ROI regularly.

Conclusion

As architects, our role in strategically managing Data Cloud usage extends well beyond technical considerations. By prioritizing use cases, crafting thoughtful roadmaps, and including usage considerations into governance, we set the stage for sustainable, value-driven solutions. Remember, intentional architecture isn’t just about building efficiently — it’s about aligning technology with business objectives and stakeholder expectations. By embracing these principles, you can ensure that Data Cloud not only meets immediate demands but also drives long-term success for your organization.

Related Links:

• Data Cloud Usage: Discovery Questions and Design Considerations
• Credit mutipliers in Data Cloud
• Service usage in Data Cloud
• Use flow to orchestrate a refresh
• Create a nested segment
• Understand merge containers

Build Your Data Cloud Usage Strategy was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we released new features and content to the Well-Architected Framework and the Pattern & Anti-Pattern Explorer 🎉. These new enhancements, while small, are a first step in a larger effort to bring Data Cloud and Einstein into the Well-Architected Framework and to enhance the usability of our tools. Here’s a look at what’s new.

Well-Architected Guidance for Data Cloud & Einstein

We finally have guidance for Data Cloud & Einstein in Salesforce Well-Architected. This is a big milestone for us, because it is the first time we’re publishing guidance that Salesforce can stand behind for these new innovations. We stand behind this guidance thanks to a cross-functional group of experts from our engineering, product, professional services and pre-sales organizations who came together to identify, debate, and discuss what patterns our customer architects should follow (and the anti-patterns they should avoid) when designing solutions with CRM, Data Cloud and Einstein.

You’ll be able to find this new content by navigating to the Pattern & Anti-Pattern Explorer where you can filter for the Location of either Data Cloud or Generative AI.

The group of experts who helped with this release will continue to identify new guidance and iterate on our backlog of guidance for publication on architect.salesforce.com leading up to Dreamforce.

Usability Enhancements for the Pattern & Anti-Pattern Explorer

As we continue to build out our library of patterns & anti-patterns, being able to find the guidance you need fast is more important than ever. We heard your feedback about the usability of the Pattern/Anti-Pattern Explorer, and that you wanted to search across the entire Framework without knowing what part of the Framework taxonomy the guidance is stored in. That’s why we adjusted the filter behavior of the Explorer. Now you can search for patterns & anti-patterns without first selecting a Framework dimension.

July 2024 Release Contributors

Thank you so much to our content contributors and technical reviewers:

• Ahmed Keshk
• Andres Perez
• Arturo Alvarado
• Arvind Raman
• Bret Brizzee
• CJ Buskey
• Gina Nichols
• Jim Stukas
• Jordan Seeley
• Justin Piehowski
• Marc Braga
• Marissa Chesney
• Matt Dykeman
• Michael DePuy
• Moustafa Ishak Kamal Moustafa
• Patrick Hermiller
• Scott Robbins
• Shoby Abdi
• Stella Hang
• Susannah Plaisted
• Tom Leddy
• Zayne Turner

Tell Us What You Think

We can’t wait to here what you think about the latest changes! Help us keep Salesforce Well-Architected relevant to you; take our survey to provide feedback on this content and tell us what you’d like to see next.

July 2024 Well-Architected Framework Release was originally published in Salesforce Architects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.