The Flow team has been working with Marketing Cloud to add Flow-powered journeys to next-generation Marketing features and services. The first capabilities are rolling out in Summer ’23. To access them, you’ll need a Salesforce org based on the newly renamed Starter Edition (This is the edition that previously was named Salesforce Easy and before that Salesforce Essentials). (The link above provides trial orgs, but as of this writing they have not yet been upgraded to Summer ’23).

Flows are accessible outside of Setup in Starter Edition

Start Edition is the first place where you can build flows as a non-Admin ‘citizen. Here, you can see that Flows are one of the tools that are available to marketers from outside of Setup.

When you select Flows here, you aren’t taken to Setup, but to a standard list view:

When flows that support citizen building are saved, a data record is generated alongside the traditional flow setup object that contains the flow’s metadata. These two objects are kept in sync automatically. It’s the data records that are being shown in the list view above.

One reason for introducing this object duality is to enable sharing rules and other sharing infrastructure to be applied to the flow creation process. For more information, see the Citizen Flows section, below.

Flow-Based Marketing Journeys

Starter Edition features a new Marketing service centered around Campaigns. When you create a Campaign, this is what you see:

The top ‘Single Email’ choice is an wizard that autogenerates a simple email send using this UI:

This user experience is essentially a specialized flow generator, and you can go to the Flow list and see the underlying flow:

You can open it directly and modify it:

The Send Email Message added to these marketing campaigns is a new action that makes use of a brand new messaging service that rides on top of Data Cloud. Here’s what the configuration looks like for this action:

Here’s what the Segment section of the Start element looks like when the trigger is a Segment-Based trigger:

Clicking on Edit Segment Rules, as shown here:

…will take you to the Segment Builder in Data Cloud:

This is part of what was introduced as Genie at Dreamforce last year and is now introduced as Data Cloud.

So, putting the above sections together: When you buy Starter Edition, you get marketing as part of the package, including a customer data platform, powerful segmentation capabilities, and flow-based journeys. In subsequent releases, the marketing feature set will get richer and will become available beyond Starter Edition and gradually grow to meet the most demanding enterprise marketing needs.

Citizen Flow Building (Only in Starter Edition in Summer ’23)

In Starter Edition in Summer ’23 it is for the first time possible to create flows without being a Salesforce Admin. Traditionally, opening Flow Builder and saving flows has required the Manage Flows permission and this provides the ability to create flows that run in System Mode. Customers have been asking for ways to enable non-admins like marketers to create and edit flows in a protected way. The first deployment of this citizen flow creation is coming in the new Marketing application in Starter Edition in Summer ’23.

Key user experience differences

• Flows are visible not just in the Flow node in Setup but also in a new Flow record home that works like other object home pages. This means that you don’t need to go to Setup to see a list of flows.
• You can create a new flow from this Flow record home or edit an existing flow. It will take you directly into Flow Builder
• Currently, the only flows that show up in this record home are flows belonging to a new flow type called Engagement Flow.
• You don’t need View Setup access to be able to enter Flow Builder.

In Summer ’23, security is provided by limiting what an Engagement Flow can do. Engagement Flows only have access to Send Email action and Wait by Duration element, and only work with a new trigger labeled the Engagement Flow trigger. This trigger is a Schedule-based trigger that works with a Segment from Data Cloud. Data Cloud is an inherent part of next generation marketing functionality.

Using a process type to limit what these citizen-enabled flows can do in Summer ’23 in an intermediate step on the way to Granular Flow Permissions. That’s work that going on to enable a permission set to be defined that exactly specifies what a citizen has access to in Flow Builder. For example, it will be able to craft a permission set that says provides access to Update and Create Records but not Delete Records, and Platform-Event Triggers but not Record-Change Triggers

New Element – Wait Until Date

Wait Until Date is part of a new generation of Wait elements that are more focused and easier to use than the traditional Flow Pause element. There’s going to be some overlap in functionality. (In fact, we’re considering renaming the Pause element to be ‘Advanced Wait’ to emphasize its power.) Like the rest of the functionality described in this post, this element is only available in the Starter Edition in Summer ’23, but Salesforce does plan to make Wait Until Date available for all editions soon.

New Element – Wait For Amount of Time

See the notes above regarding the Wait Until Date element.Salesforce does plan to make this element available for all editions soon.

Learn about other Summer ’23 Flow Features here.

The Barcode Scanner for Flow now supports continuous scan functionality, this means you can scan multiple barcodes keeping the device camera open to capture as many barcode values into a single text collection for use in Screen Flow. To see all details visit the original post here and for a quick demonstration of continuous scan functionality see the video below.

QuickChoice, the multi-purpose picklist component, has been updated again. In addition to supporting picklist filtering by Record Type, you can now support Dependent Picklists by stacking as many QuickChoice components as you need on the same screen with the new Reactive Screen beta. Full support is provided for controlling Checkbox or Picklist fields. Check out a video of this in action on the QuickChoice documentation page.

An additional feature has also been added. You can now display Rich Text in the body of Visual Card selections.

Install the latest version (3.0.19) of the Flow Screen Components Base Pack to get the latest version of QuickChoice.

I’ve updated the Import/Export Flows utility to use the current version of the Flow Base Packs. I’ve also updated the Installation to use unlocked packaging links.

Read more about this utility and others on the Utilities Page.

Very clever and creative stuff here. This package adds an action called Streamscript. When you add this action to your flow…

…the custom property editor provides an elegant little script editor:

Using this editor, it’s possible to set up powerful HTTP Callout and Webhook solutions.

Here’s script that works with an incoming webhook from Github. Streamscript has built in JSON parsing tools to get at the payload of the webhook:

There’s a lot of power behind this tool. Check it out here.