Salesforce Spring ’25 Release: Fresh Features – New Possibilities!

As winter’s chill holds steady, the Salesforce Ohana are already basking in the warmth of spring—a season of renewal, growth, and boundless possibilities.

Much like the first blooms of spring, the Salesforce Spring 2025 Release brings fresh energy to the CRM landscape. 

With transformative features and updates, this release promises to revitalize your Salesforce ecosystem, helping you grow, adapt, and thrive.

From smarter AI solutions to streamlined integrations, Salesforce is planting the seeds for a more productive, efficient, and innovative tomorrow.

Ready to explore this season’s freshest picks? Let’s dive into the highlights that will make your Salesforce journey bloom!

Spring ’25 Salesforce Release: How to Prepare and What’s New

The Salesforce Spring ’25 release introduces several updates that will auto-enable once rolled out to your orgs. Some changes require immediate attention to ensure smooth transitions and avoid disruptions to your business operations. This section details key updates, their impact, and step-by-step instructions on how you can prepare in both sandbox and production environments.

1. Change in Einstein Activity Capture Permissions for Sales Engagement Basic Users

What’s New?
With the Spring ‘25 release, Salesforce is tightening access control over the Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) feature, which automatically logs emails and calendar events for users. Users who are assigned the Sales Engagement Basic User permission set will no longer have default access to Einstein Activity Capture. Instead, they will need to be granted access through the Standard Einstein Activity Capture permission set. This shift is designed to streamline access management and ensure that only those eligible for this advanced feature can utilize it. 

How Will This Help?
This change enhances security by ensuring that access to sensitive activity data is controlled based on the user’s role and permission level. Decoupling the Einstein Activity Capture permissions from the Sales Engagement Basic User set provides greater flexibility and governance over data access.

How to Prepare:

• In Sandbox:
  • Identify Affected Users: Review the user profiles that currently use the Sales Engagement Basic User permission set. These users will be impacted by the update and will lose access to Einstein Activity Capture unless reassigned to the correct permission set.
  • Automated Identification: Use Salesforce’s built-in tools, such as the Permission Set List Views and User Permission Set Assignments, to generate reports showing which users are assigned the Sales Engagement Basic User permission.
  • Grant Correct Permissions: You’ll need to manually assign the Standard Einstein Activity Capture permission set to those users who still need access. This can be done through the Permission Set Assignment page in Salesforce Setup. 
• In Production:
  • Once you’ve thoroughly tested the permissions in the sandbox, you can replicate the changes in your production environment.
  • Monitor User Access:  Once the Spring ’25 has been rolled out in production, make sure all the impacted users still have the EAC access via the “Standard Einstein Activity Capture” permission set. 

2. Transition to ICU Locale Formats

What’s New?
Salesforce is transitioning to ICU Locale Formats to handle localization for things like dates, currencies, and numbers, moving away from Oracle’s JDK Locale formats. This change will impact any custom code or org-level settings that rely on date formatting, numeric display, or locale-specific information, particularly in multi-language or multi-region environments.

How Will This Help?
The ICU (International Components for Unicode) framework is a more robust solution for internationalization and localization, improving the accuracy and performance of formatting operations. This update will help standardize how Salesforce manages locale-sensitive data across a diverse set of users.

How to Prepare:

• In Sandbox:
  • Evaluate Current Locale Settings: Identify all areas in your Salesforce org that involve locale-specific data formatting, such as Apex code, and Visualforce pages. Review how Locale and Currency fields are being used in custom logic or integrations.
  • Testing the Impact: Deploy the update in your sandbox environment to simulate the migration to ICU. Ensure your organization is using valid locale formats, and test date, currency, and number fields across different locales.
  • Review Custom Code: Check Apex classes, and triggers that use locale-dependent logic (for example, formatting dates or currencies). Ensure that all these components are compatible with ICU formatting. 
  • Migration Path: If your org still uses JDK-based formats, review the Salesforce Guide for ICU Migration to identify potential changes.
• In Production:
  • After successfully testing in your sandbox, deploy the changes to production.  

3. Introduction of LWC Stacked Modals

What’s New?
Salesforce is introducing a new behavior for modal windows in Lightning Web Components (LWC), where modals are “stacked” on top of each other rather than closing automatically. This update will affect any overridden standard actions or custom actions using modals in your Salesforce org.

How Will This Help?
The goal of this update is to provide a smoother user experience by ensuring modals remain available and accessible even after an action has been completed. With stacked modals, users can easily navigate between multiple modal windows without losing context.

How to Prepare:

• In Sandbox:
  • Identify Custom Actions with Modals: Review any custom Quick Actions or overridden standard actions that use modal windows. Focus on identifying Aura Components and Lightning Web Components that invoke modals in their flow.
  • Test the New Modal Behavior: In your sandbox environment, simulate user actions that open multiple modals. Ensure that the stacking behavior aligns with your intended user experience. Check if any issues arise, such as modal windows not stacking correctly or causing user confusion.
  • Update or Modify Custom Components: Depending on your tests, you may need to update your modal components to ensure the new stacked behavior doesn’t disrupt existing workflows.
• In Production:
  • Deploy your updates after confirming that your sandbox tests were successful. Inform your users about the change, as the new behavior may affect their interactions with Salesforce modals.
  • Ensure Seamless Navigation: Test the new stacking behavior in a live environment with actual users. Monitor whether users experience any issues when interacting with stacked modals.

4. Secure Redirection for Flows

What’s New?
With the Spring ’25 release, Salesforce will require that Flow redirections with retURL parameters be added to the trusted URLs list. This is a security enhancement to prevent malicious redirections that could compromise your organization’s data and user experience.

How Will This Help?
This update reduces the risk of security vulnerabilities related to Flow redirection. By explicitly listing trusted URLs, you ensure that all redirects from Flows go to known and secure destinations, protecting your organization’s data and user interactions.

How to Prepare:

• In Sandbox:
  • Review All Flows Using retURL: Identify all Flows that utilize the retURL parameter for redirection. Check where the Flow is redirecting users after completion (for example, after submitting a form or completing a task).
  • Add URLs to the Trusted List: Ensure that any external URLs referenced in your Flows are added to the Trusted URLs for Redirects list in Salesforce Setup. This step is critical for ensuring the security of your org when redirecting users from Flows.
  • Test All Redirection Flows: Simulate end-user interactions with your Flows to verify that redirections function as expected and that no errors occur when navigating to external sites.
• In Production:
  • Once you’ve successfully tested in sandbox, implement the changes in production. Be sure to update the trusted URLs list before deploying. This ensures that your Flows can continue to function securely in your production environment.
  • Monitor User Experience: After deploying the update, closely monitor any users who interact with redirected Flows to ensure they don’t encounter issues related to broken or untrusted links.

5. Rollbacks for Apex Action Exceptions in REST API

What’s New?
The Spring ’25 update enforces automatic rollbacks for any exceptions that occur when an Apex Action is invoked via the REST API. This means that if an Apex action fails, any changes made during the API call will be rolled back, ensuring data consistency.

How Will This Help?
This update strengthens your organization’s data integrity by preventing partial updates or failed operations from being saved to Salesforce. In the past, failures in Apex actions during REST API calls might have left inconsistent data behind. The rollback mechanism prevents this by ensuring that no changes are committed when an error occurs.

How to Prepare:

• In Sandbox:
  • Identify Affected Apex Actions: Review all Apex actions that are invoked via the REST API. Determine which Apex classes or triggers might be impacted by this new rollback rule.
  • Simulate Failure Scenarios: Use tools like Postman or Workbench to simulate error conditions in your API calls. Test the rollback behavior to ensure that the system behaves as expected when an exception is thrown. 
• In Production:
  • Once successful testing has been completed in sandbox, replicate your changes in production. Ensure that all stakeholders, including developers and API consumers, are informed of the new rollback behavior.
  • Monitor API Calls: After deployment, monitor the REST API logs to ensure that rollbacks are functioning as expected and that no issues arise from incomplete transactions.

Final Notes

This release brings significant improvements across permissions, localization, user interface design, and security, all aimed at increasing your Salesforce org’s efficiency, security, and performance. By following these detailed preparation steps, you can ensure a seamless transition and leverage the full benefits of the Spring ‘25 release while keeping your org secure, user-friendly, and fully optimized.