Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about what’s coming in the Summer ‘25 release and the features that will make your life easier as an admin.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee.

The Summer ‘25 release is coming soon

It’s that time of year again. The time for popsicles, backyard barbecues, and the Summer ‘25 Release. So I’ve brought none other than Jennifer Lee on the pod to tell us what’s coming for admins.

As always, Jen has a great blog post covering all of the changes with animated gifs that show how they work. I’d highly recommend scrolling through it as a visual companion to this episode, but the big takeaway here is that admins’ lives are about to get a whole lot easier.

Jen’s highlights from the Summer ‘25 release

At a high level, Summer ‘25 means fewer clicks and more control for admins. Jen highlights some key changes:

The Close Case button: No need for custom buttons—you can add a Close Case button to the Case Details page and save your reps the extra clicks.
Better custom object deletion: When you delete a custom object, you’ll see a detailed page listing any relationships it has to other objects.
The new Permission Set Summary page: You can now update user, object, field, and custom permissions directly from a permission set’s Summary page, without navigating to multiple pages.
Expanded Salesforce Go: Your guided tour for how to enable/configure features in your Salesforce edition, with resources to help you get started.

As always with releases, the little things add up. And these changes help you effortlessly manage your org like never before.

Powerful new features in Flow

Of course, no episode with Jen would be complete without diving into the changes coming for Flow. She draws our attention to a few key enhancements for Flow:

Get related records (beta): Instead of dealing with multiple Get Records and Update Records elements, you can now get entire hierarchies of related records, such as an Account and all of its Contacts and Opportunities, in a single Get Records element.
Expanded resources search in Flow Builder (beta): When you enable this feature in Setup, you’ll be able to quickly find resources like fields from records and outputs from actions.
New Time data type: You can now reference the new Time data type for things like scheduling reminders, routing records based on specific times of day, and triggering time-sensitive actions with pinpoint accuracy.
Debug enhancements: Debugging your flows has never been easier, with element-level summaries, and search capabilities within the debug to help get your flow flowing.
Approval Wizard: It’s complicated to build an approval process, so we’ve made it easier to get started with up to three approval levels, final actions, and even a recall path.

There are a lot more great insights from Jen about screen flow enhancements and other changes coming in Summer ‘25, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript

Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week, Jennifer Lee returns to the pod to break down what's new in the summer '25 release. And trust me, it's more than sunshine and good vibes if you read her blog post that she put out earlier in May. From long-awaited case close buttons to a major user management upgrade, I promise you Jennifer is going to walk us through some features that make your admin life easier. Plus we dig into flow enhancements, better debugging and why thoughtful resource naming still matters. I mean, we can't not talk flow with Jennifer Lee, that's just how it works. If you've ever been wondering what to focus on with your attention to this release cycle, this is your episode. Super fun to go through. Now, if you enjoy this episode, be sure to hit that follow or subscribe button on whatever podcast platform you're listening to. So with that, let's get Jennifer back on the podcast. So Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

Jennifer Lee: Always love being here.

Mike: I mean, it's summer already. It feels like it was just spring. We were just talking about spring and now it's summer. Isn't this how it always works?

Jennifer Lee: Well, now I'm actually feeling summer for real in Boston. It's hot out, I'm wearing shorts.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, every time I've been to Boston it's either snow, really hot or snow.

Jennifer Lee: And it was cold probably a few days ago too, so I'll take it.

Mike: Right. Yep, that's okay. But with summer comes summer release, and we're a little behind. We're not terribly far behind. But you did put out a blog post back in May about summer '25 features for admin. So I figured we could talk through those because sometimes there's stuff that you learn after you write about it that you wanted to bring up that maybe you didn't get a chance to bring up. So that's where we're going to start. But before we do that, what other things are you working on? Anything fun you want to share?

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I'm always learning more... Like with our admins, learning more about Agentforce. So currently working on a video, should be out shortly, so we'll say that. And again, working on a new series, we should have that out not too long from now. So a lot of things in the works.

Mike: Cool. I know there's always fun stuff, always fun stuff, but well, let's talk release stuff. So what were some of your top features this summer?

Jennifer Lee: Okay, so for those who have case management, you always had to create your own custom close button. And it's the little things, it's the little things in these releases that make it, right. So now there's a standard close button. You don't need to go and make your own. You can just bring in the standard close button to your record page layout and boom, on your page layout, you can just say close case and it works. Again, the little tiny things.

Mike: But you know what, I mean sometimes release stuff doesn't have to be like, "Look at this giant 60,000 foot tower I built." It can be, "Look at this little stool that you can now close your cases with."

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, and another thing I like, so bringing me back to my admin days, is when you go and you tried to delete an object. And it just goes, [inaudible 00:03:50]-

Mike: [inaudible 00:03:51].

Jennifer Lee: You got other stuff going on there, you have dependencies, you can't delete it, and then you had to go and find all the places.

Mike: Yeah.

Jennifer Lee: That was not fun.

Mike: No.

Jennifer Lee: Not fun at all. But with this release now when you try to delete an object, it'll say you can't delete it, but it'll show you all the dependencies. So all the object in the fields, and then it gives you a hyperlink so that you can go and click on that and easily find the thing that you have to delete before you can actually go ahead and delete the object. So again, it's the little tiny things like that. And Cheryl Feldman's team continues to deliver and make enhancements to user management because we all know user management can be a mess. But she's delivering stuff to make lives easier for admin so that we can focus on the cooler things that we can build out. But here are some of the highlights on the things that her team is delivering in this release. So when you're in object manager on an object, you can now go to the access page, and from there you can review and add and remove permissions from custom profiles and permission sets, and not have to navigate away. So your object access is right there, your field level access is right there.

Mike: Wow.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, these are huge.

Mike: Yeah, I'm looking at the GIFs that you have in that blog post.

Jennifer Lee: I love making GIFs.

Mike: I know it's kind of-

Jennifer Lee: It really brings a feature to life.

Mike: Here's a pro-tip. As you listen to this podcast, look at the blog post and it's like surround sound. Sorry, I interrupted you. Go on.

Jennifer Lee: Oh, no worries. Another thing is on the permission set summary page, again, it's not having to click all these places to do the thing, but on the permission set summary, you can now update user object, field and custom permissions right there. Again, you don't need to navigate away to those places to do it. Same thing with permission set groups, on that summary page, you can add and remove permissions within your permission set group. So that's great. And then additionally on the user summary page, so on the user record, you click that summary button. From there you can edit tab access directly, and then you can add and remove assignments for the user to perm sets, groups and queues.

Mike: I think that tab thing's probably the coolest thing that if you've ever had to go through and figure out-

Jennifer Lee: Where it is.

Mike: I mean just like, "Oh, where did I stick that tab on these 10 applications?" Or, "Who can see this?" Or why. There was always one user that just randomly had a tab show up. "Sorry, let me go fix that."

Jennifer Lee: And as it relates to user management, if you haven't tried out Salesforce Go, I recommend you go and do that. That really simplifies when you're setting up your features. And it also provides access to videos and you can do tours, or it points you to some Trailhead modules and guides you through how to enable features based on your addition that you have in your org, and also whatever clouds you have. So if you have Sales Cloud, there's a Sales Cloud section, Service Cloud, Service Cloud section. So it really makes enabling features in your org much easier.

Mike: So Salesforce Go, you should go check it out.

Jennifer Lee: Like that.

Mike: Go. Go.

Jennifer Lee: All right. And no release would be complete without me talking about flow.

Mike: I mean, I feel like at this point it's the sound of clouds separating, "Flow!" And angels singing.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah.

Mike: You're like, "Yeah, okay, let's talk about flow."

Jennifer Lee: I can talk about flow all day long as you know [inaudible 00:08:10]-

Mike: I know, I know.

Jennifer Lee: So in the Get Records element, when you're doing Get Records for whatever object it is, you can now have the ability to get the related records as well. Right before, you would have your one Get Records for the object, and then you would do another Get Records for the related objects. Now you could do it all in one, and then when you click and you say, "Oh, I want related records," then from there there's an interface that allows you to select the fields for that record and you still train and all that.

Mike: Does that apply to... Obviously it's master detail, but what about lookup relationship?

Jennifer Lee: I believe it's right now-

Mike: Master detail.

Jennifer Lee: [inaudible 00:08:57] detail.

Mike: Okay, that's what I figured, but still...

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, it's still big.

Mike: Get Records account. Hello.

Jennifer Lee: Yep. So when you are finding your resources, let's say in your flow you have a lot of things you want to look up or related and all that. You now can use the expanded resources search, which you have to enable and set up, and then it'll be available in your flow to quickly find resources. So one thing to note was we did push this out, so something similar to this in winter and we took it back, and then based on customer feedback, we brought it back and improved it.

Mike: Do you have... While we're talking resources, do you have... Because I was looking at your GIF, and I would imagine you have a methodology for how you name your resources. How would you advise admins name their resources? Because obviously this is super powerful.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, so when I create my own custom resources, I do have a certain name in convention, so if I have variables, I'll do a VAR in the front of it, if I can easily find those. Or if I have a record collection, I'll always have the word collection in there, so I can easily find it. Or if you're using a text template, the word text template or a formula. So I'll just put those little keywords so that when you're doing the search and you know it's the thing that you're looking for, you can easily type that in and then they'll show up in the search.

Mike: Yeah, no, it's smart. I like that. Thank you.

Jennifer Lee: And then for people who have flows that deal with time, we now have the time data type that you can use, and you can also reference time formulas as well in your flows. So that's huge for people who have those time dependent flows.

Mike: Wow.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah.

Mike: Oh, that gives me a little bit of anxiety. I see minute is an option. And second, holy cow, second. Bless you people that have time dependent flows.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I had a few of those as a customer.

Mike: Okay. What would be an example of that? Like was it on cases mostly?

Jennifer Lee: Yeah.

Mike: Because you need to follow up or it needs to do something like hippity hop right now.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, we were a big Service Cloud customer, so yeah.

Mike: So based on how old that case is or how long that's been, yeah, I could see that. Boy! Testing.

Jennifer Lee: So the flow team has also made enhancements to debug. So now it has slightly different UI, but it's so much easier to debug your flows. They now have element level summaries, and you also have search capabilities within the debug. So let's say you're working through and you have a variable that you're just checking to see if the data flows through and the various elements. You can do a search on that variable name and it'll pop up and kind of highlight where it is in the debug elements so that you can go through. You can also show API names and things like that, so it's really more interactive than it was previously.

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. Boy, that's got to be helpful.

Jennifer Lee: And for admins who have approvals as part of your process, there's now a new wizard, will help you build your flow approvals. I never really use approvals, like I never really had a need to use approvals in my business, but the process of going through the approval process seemed really clunky.

Mike: I built approvals a few times, and the problem I always had is the company kept changing the approval process and not telling me. So that, or making the approval process something wonky, that was super hard to build.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I would believe that.

Mike: You're like, "Yep, been there." "Did you even consult me?" "No, we just changed this." And so now... And then you always had users that were like, "Well, but that doesn't go to the right person." I know, they changed that without telling me.

Jennifer Lee: And I was supposed to know.

Mike: My time machine... What was that? What's that... I was thinking of that. Cerebro from X-Men. "My Cerebro is in the shop."

Jennifer Lee: All right, so a couple of screen flow enhancements. So you now have the ability to trigger a screen action without needing a button. So previously we had a button that was in beta, so now that's generally available. So go ahead and use it on all the places everyone. There's also now a new feature called File Upload Enhanced (Beta) component. It's in beta. You can bring in the component and with File Upload, you can now set it to require files to be uploaded. So if you have cases and you have a screen flow, you want people to upload files, previously they could forget about it. And then you're like, "Oh, well I wanted you to give me supporting documentation," but there's no way to require that, and now you can. So note that you do need to enable that feature in Salesforce Files and set up, and then it'll show up in your screen flows.

Mike: So then that puts the file on the record?

Jennifer Lee: Yes.

Mike: Oh, man. These are all things I needed 20 years-

Jennifer Lee: Back then, right? Back then when we were admins.

Mike: Oh, I so... Oh, just the number of times I would have... Well first of all, we did have screen flow. I envisioned what a screen flow would look like, and then they'd be like... Then at this point, it should be like a website and you upload a thing that maps out all the sites. And I'd be like, "That sounds really cool, I wish I could build that." Now it's 2025, now I could build that.

Jennifer Lee: Yes, without a developer.

Mike: And the file just goes to the record and away we go.

Jennifer Lee: Yep, yep. And then lastly, on screen flows, you could... Like imagine your screen flows, you have multiple columns and fields. Let's say you're collecting an address, the street, zip code, state, those are different sizes. You typically don't have a long field for a two-state drop down [inaudible 00:16:20]. So now you have the ability to adjust the components and the fields on your screen flows to say, "Here's the width I want to use," and then do the vertical alignment too. So it really makes your screen flows look so much prettier-

Mike: Oh my god.

Jennifer Lee: ... than before.

Mike: And just useful. I'm watching your GIF, and the number of street, city, state zip fields that I've had in orgs that are all the same size. And everybody's always like, "Well, how come you can't make it look like an address field?" Well, you see there are reasons, but not anymore.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, that's my wrap up.

Mike: Those are cool.

Jennifer Lee: But there's more in the blog.

Mike: I mean there is, you scrolled through a lot. There's always a ton, and it's a ton... And it's always based on like, I think it's fun when you go through the stuff, the release notes every year and you kind of look at it. Because the stuff you always get the most excited about are the things that frustrated you that you kind of knew weren't hard to fix. It was just like at some point you know it's going to bubble up on the calendar and somebody's going to knock it out. I think that styling for flows is huge. I mean flows for the... Screen flows for me are the easiest way I can get into flow and kind of understand it because you can visually see what you're putting in, but the ability to edit the way that looks has always been not the most easy. But this now... I like your example, you're like, this is a really long label for a long text area. Yeah, I mean, it spells it out, but it's really helpful to understand because the end user's the one that's going to stare at it all day. You're going to look at it a few times in testing, and you also talk about, "Oh, icons. Oh, these are cool too."

Jennifer Lee: Oh, those icons that you can use... So if you have a pick list in your screen flow, you can add little icons to make it easier as well.

Mike: It's funny, I was on a related unrelated topic. I was at a car show a couple weekends ago, and I ran into somebody and we were talking. He said, "Oh, well, I code for the university because I live in Iowa City." And I said, "Oh, cool." He asked me, "Where do you work?" I said I work at Salesforce. And so immediately he thinks I understand code. I wasn't going to say otherwise. But the next words out of his mouth really caught me off guard. He said, "You know, your lightning design system is probably one of the most well-thought-out documented systems I have ever had to work with." And I bring that up because the images of those like, excellent, good, like the way that our iconography kind of looks within the system, I think is really cool. So is a long walk for a short drink of water, but... And it would carry over. Plus anytime that you can mix things up and use images... I mean images, do you remember back in the day, you used to set up a resource library and import all these images, like four star images and five star images and stuff, and then you would show that on the screen. I used to have users that were like, "You're a wizard. I can now see stars on my account page." And I was like, "Yes, I am."

Jennifer Lee: I do remember that back in the day.

Mike: Because the edit page would just show them a number, but the actual page... Anyway, off on tangents. Off on tangents.

Jennifer Lee: Oh, I do have a note. So there's one thing that is in summer that I didn't include in my blog because I wrote my blog and then I found out that it's in this release, but Prompt Builder undergoes a major UI change. So for those who use prompt templates, check it out. It is a better UI right now in summer. So think of the little preview section that you have, the resolution that has its own tab now, and you don't have that little window that you have to scroll to see everything. Yes.

Mike: Okay. I like that. I was going to say it wasn't that bad. And then I was thinking, "I've done a bunch of those Agentforce NOW tours.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, like this itty bitty thing-

Mike: Well, there's always a part... There's kind of two parts on that. The intro of the Agentforce NOW tour that I do. One of them is shortly after you enable the agent and then you have to show the drop-down open agent and builder. And it's literally right at the bottom bar of your web browser. So I would always tell people like, "Look at me in the camera," and I would point and be like, "It's at the very bottom because you're probably looking at a screen and you can't find my cursor. It's at the very bottom." And then there was always that. Then the second time was when we would test prompts after we've built our first prompt and we brought in some fields in that resolution window, I'd always point on camera down at the bottom. Like, "It's down at the bottom all the way on the far right." So sticking those in their own... You said their own window?

Jennifer Lee: They're like little plus and minuses, and then they'll expand out to show the [inaudible 00:22:42]-

Mike: So much nicer. So much nicer.

Jennifer Lee: So the preview button has also moved up to the upper left-hand corner.

Mike: Okay. Yeah, because where it was before kind of didn't make sense.

Jennifer Lee: So you can hit this little icon and then set your record and then you'll hit the preview button next to it, and then it'll do all its magic. Yeah, folks should definitely check that out because it's a great improvement to what it is today.

Mike: Absolutely. Jen, thanks for coming by and pointing out some of the newest features. I mean, I'd read your post, but it's kind of always nice to hear from the person and you know, like, "Oh, here's what's really cool," because sometimes texts on a page just don't convey it.

Jennifer Lee: Yeah, and I just like geeking out about Salesforce so I can talk about-

Mike: I know.

Jennifer Lee: ... [inaudible 00:23:44] all day long.

Mike: I think back to the days of going through the release notes, and now I have this fun competition, and when I say fun competition, it's fun for me. I like to go through the release notes and then I like to feed the release notes to an AI, and be like, "What do you think are the top features I would like or top features for admins?" And I like to see what it finds versus what I find, kind of like a treasure hunt.

Jennifer Lee: And what did it do for this release?

Mike: It was kind of a little all over the place. Yeah, it wasn't as concise as yours. It also doesn't understand how cool flows are, and so it points things out. I will say this, it's very helpful in getting through sometimes a lot of release notes and finding things you might've not read. I think that one of the coolest pieces of advice I was ever given by somebody was, read all of the articles front end to end that are on the front page of a newspaper. Because most of those articles, very few of them are encompassed all on the front page, but they get you into the newspaper. It's also a good mixture of topics, so it might be things that you not normally read, and I think it was good advice. That is kind of like... It's like the AI version of it. Sometimes you got to feed the release notes to some AI and just see what it points out because it might be things that you scrolled past and had no idea.

Jennifer Lee: Because there's a lot to go through.

Mike: I mean, the other part of it too is it's an enterprise level platform, so you kind of want it to be a lot of release notes. I do anyway. Anyway, thanks for coming by, Jen. We'll be sure to check out your videos on YouTube because they're always super explanatory, and they're helping people understand agents and flow, and how agents use flow and how you can put flow into agents.

Jennifer Lee: Well, thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike: You bet. Big thanks to Jennifer for walking us through the summer '25 updates. It's always a treat to hear her perspective, and it gives that blog post so much more life, right? There's a lot of things that we find out. She walked us through fine-tuning flows and trimming down clicks and user management, and just discovering the magic of the time data type. This release really has something for everybody. You can hear me go through my brain on writing flows with that time data type. That was... I had a moment, I will just say. Be sure to check out Jen's YouTube videos because she dives through so much stuff and they are so incredibly useful, and I'll include a link to her blog post as well. And of course, if you enjoyed today's episode, go ahead and give it a share. Maybe send it to your friends, your admin friends, or other people in the community that would benefit from being up-to-date on the summer '25 release features. So with that, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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