Salesforce spring 2023 release: The business executive’s guide, part 1

The Salesforce Spring ‘23 Release Notes are out, with hundreds of new features. Sounds overwhelming, right? This two-part guide summarizes the 630 pages and the most notable updates. 

Part 1 covers commerce and content management features, specifically the new Lighting Web Runtime template and enhancements to Salesforce Payments and CMS. Overall, this release provides a more user-friendly interface that simplifies the platform without sacrificing performance. 

In addition, more AI capabilities are provided that enable you and your team to work smarter and have more meaningful conversations with customers. Finally, Salesforce is making it easier to integrate external data source inflows. Simplifying the use of inflows will help your business run more seamlessly, which in turn, will make your customer experience better. 

Build sites faster and cheaper with Lightning Web Runtime (LWR)​ 

For B2B businesses, the new Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) commerce solutions will enable web developers to build out sites cheaper and faster. The improved functionality will help your business perform better by alleviating slow run times and providing more personalized experiences. 

The LWR template for B2B stores makes it easier to customize your storefront because the larger components have been broken down into smaller ones. For example, the commerce header can now be broken down into logos, navigation, search, cart features and more. That leads to better-looking sites while maintaining the user-friendly experience your customers expect. 

The new framework also improves run speed and performance. The LWR checkout process is now highly configurable, making it faster for users. Previously, checkout processes used flows. Now, Salesforce Commerce offers a fully configurable checkout for B2B businesses driven by LWR components.  

Salesforce Payments is now more seamless 

Quick payment processing is a critical component for modern ecommerce businesses. Salesforce has made the process more seamless with its new payment framework, requiring less backend coding. Instead, more configurations are less technical and more user-friendly. 

Additionally, the new framework allows you to seamlessly integrate third-party payment providers for a more functional and secure checkout. For your customer, a new click-and-go function simplifies the checkout process.  

Approvals, view and restore added to Salesforce CMS

Upgrades to Salesforce CMS improve work processes, including:   

Approving content

Consultants and contributors can now create, edit and view content in their workspace. Once complete, other users can approve it or request changes. This functionality enables you to further operationalize content production and accelerate publication. 

View and restore content by version

Salesforce is catching up to WordPress by offering functionality that lets you view all previous editions of content, see who published it, track changes and revert to older versions if needed.  

Part 2 of these notes can be found here.