At the end of 2022, Salesforce will be retiring Workflow Rules and Process Builder automation. While your current Workflow Rules and Process Builders will continue to run, you will not be able to create new automation using these tools. Instead, you’ll have to create new automation using Flow.
There are currently three automation tools in Salesforce:
- Process Builder
- Workflow Rules
- Flows
Workflow rules have the most limited capabilities. Process builder extends Workflow capabilities, but the most powerful automation tool is Salesforce Flow.
Salesforce has been adding more functionality to Flow, leading to the retirement of the other two automation tools. The retirement will not happen immediately, but it is advisable to start using flows for all automation as of now. Salesforce will no longer provide new updates and features to Workflow Rules and Process Builders once the retirement has taken place. Existing rules will continue to run for some period of time while migration to flow is taking place.
Below is a timeline of how the deprecation will take place:
- A migration tool for the translation of Workflow rules to Flow will be available in the Spring ’22 release.
- In the Summer ’22 release, a migration tool for the transition of Process builder to Flow will become available.
- As of Winter ‘23, the ability to create new Workflow rules and Process builders will be blocked. Hence, only the creation of Flow will be allowed.
For those who are not yet familiar with Flow, the following points will help you bridge the gap between Flow and Process Builder/Workflow rules:
- Scheduled Paths are a replacement for Scheduled Actions in Process Builder and Time-Based Workflow Rules.
- Flows can call other sub-flows, which is a replacement for Process Builder’s ability to call flows.
- Flows now support calling Outbound Messages as well as Email Alerts from Workflow Actions.
- Flow supports a variety of ways to track what has changed during a record update. For example, a variable called $Record__Prior which gives you the state of the record prior to the update. This allows you to reference any particular field value, and you can check whether it equals null if you want to distinguish between create and update.
How to prepare your org for this change?
Firstly, start building new automation in Flow. Especially for new projects, take the time to try and implement Flows. If you have to trigger a field to update when something else on the record has changed, go to Record-Triggered Flows and use the Fast Field Update option(also known as Before Save). This will help optimise performance and reduce SOQL limits. Also, consider moving your scheduled actions from a process into a scheduled path in Flow.
Continue to work on small use cases to reach that comfort level.
Of course, do not hesitate to go through the trails on Trailhead to learn more about Flows and their features!
We hope these quick tips are useful for you.
Get in touch with Smplicity Support team for your Salesforce implementation or ongoing support.