What is changing & when?
Upon Salesforce' Winter 2023 Release, scheduled for October 14, 2022, Salesforce will no longer support the creation of new Process Builder and Workflow Rules.
Users can still edit, activate and deactivate existing Workflows, but the creation of new Workflows will no longer be supported.
What are flows?
Flows were introduced in 2017 as Salesforce’s most powerful declarative automation toolset, which allows admins and developers to create powerful automations through a visual designer that has greater flexibility than Workflows or Process Builder tools. The automations can collect, update, edit, and create records across a Salesforce instance.
How does this impact Rattles?
Today, many Rattle features leverage Workflow Rules in Salesforce. Our engineering team has been hard at work preparing for this release, reconfiguring the back end of Rattle to align with this new product direction from Salesforce.
Between October 5th and October 12th, ahead of the Salesforce Winter Release, we will be transitioning to leverage flows rather than workflow rules for any newly created Rattles. This change will be seamless for you and you will see no immediate impact to new or existing Rattles.
If you have questions about when your organization’s account will be transitioned, please contact your CSM.
What do I need to do with my existing Workflows?
Nothing at the moment. This release only affects the ability to create NEW Workflow Rules. Existing workflows will still be supported through 2025 (Users can still edit, activate and deactivate existing workflows).
In fact, Salesforce is still developing the feature set for Flows (see image below), so if you begin converting existing Workflows to Flows now, you may encounter limitations. If you do not have a business reason to convert your existing Workflow Rules, waiting until feature parity is reached between Workflows and Flows may result in better outcomes.
What about my existing Rattles?
While there is a way to migrate existing Workflow Rules to Flows, we strongly recommend waiting until Salesforce has addressed some of the feature parity issues between the two tools before taking any further action.
If there are business reasons that require you to migrate Workflow Rules now, please notify your Rattle CSM ahead of time so they can manage the migration of Rattles and ensure your Rattles are not impacted.
In the coming weeks, Rattle will issue guidance for the migration of existing Rattles to Flows.
Which Rattle features leverage Workflows?
There are several Rattle features that leverage Workflow Rules in Salesforce. Specifically, On Create/Update, Time-Based and Stuck in Stage workflow alerts, Deal Room triggers, and MeetingDMs.
Will Rattle utilize Flows going forward?
Yes! By October 12th, ahead of the SFDC Winter ‘23 release, all newly created Rattles will leverage Flows instead of Workflows. In the coming weeks, Rattle will issue guidance for the best practices for migration of existing Rattle Workflow Rules to Flows. Our goal is to make the transition seamless for you and your team.
Will each Rattle have its own Flow like they have their own Workflows today?
Salesforce’s own Workflow Rule/Process Builder migration tool executes a 1:1 conversion, for every Workflow you convert, you generate one flow. We are observing this current best practice coming from Salesforce for system driven automatic conversion of automations into Flow. Ideally, in the future we would like to support the consolidation of multiple rattles into a single flow, but the toolset in Flows is not currently advanced enough to support that logic at this time.
What changes should we expect?
From a Rattle perspective, the shift from creating new Rattles that leverage Workflows to Flows will be seamless and you will not see any immediate changes. It is important to note however, that there are currently differences between Workflows and Flows systemically. If you are to notice any difference while creating Rattles, we have compiled some helpful resources from Salesforce below and as always, reach out to your Rattle CSM in your shared Slack channel.
Some other helpful resources: