Learning Salesforce Flow - About Flow

 

About Flow

Capabilities, History and Future of Flow

• What you can do with Flow
• A short history of Flow
• The future of Flow

What can I do with Flow?

Salesforce Flow is is an automation technology that is built with the Flow Builder tool.

Flows can able to create, edit, and delete any record passed into the flow or referenced in the flow. Flows can also be scheduled in the future to run on a set interval with a collection of records.

Salesforce has indicated that Flow is becoming the main declarative (clicks-not-code) tool for building automation on the Salesforce platform. Workflows were the first automation tool and are now being retired. The second generation was the Process Builder, this too will eventually be retired, leaving Salesforce Flow as the primary tool.

What type of automation can be built with Flow?

Just about anything that you previously built with workflow or Process Builder can now be built with flow. While there are a few small gaps in functionality, these are quickly being resolved with each new release. Flow is the only tool that will receive ongoing development from Salesforce in the future.

User Interactive Flows

Want to build a wizard to collect data from a user?

Flow is the only automation tool that supports user interaction (selections and data input),
you can't do that with Workflows or Process Builder, they both operate in the background.

Before Save Record Updates

With almost the speed of Apex Triggers, before save flows are a high-performance alternative to writing Apex code. Performance is estimated at up to 10x that of Process Builder.

Check out this great article by Luke Freeland on benchmarking performance that compares triggers, Flow, and Process Builder.

Read, Create, Update and Delete Records

You can read, create, update and delete records whether they are related to the current record or not.

There is almost no limit to what you can achieve with flow.

A Brief History of Flow

Flow began as a way to visualize customer interactions and enable better decision management support for businesses. Since processes have a natural business flow to them, a team of software developers from the UK got together to improve the way those interactions take place. This team formed a company called Informavores which would be later acquired by Salesforce in late 2009. By bridging the gaps between various systems with a visual process diagram and allow process to change data in those systems, business integrations could not only be shown on paper, they could be measured by how often individual process paths were used provide facts gain insight to business. While Flow used to require a separate desktop app to design a Flow, you can now do it natively in your browser. While Flow used to look a bit different than “standard Salesforce”, it can now look like what your users are already familiar with in Salesforce or even be embedded in a Visualforce page for a completely custom look.

Since these early days, Flow has had a few different names:

• Visual Workflow
• Lightning Flow
• Salesforce Flow

Between Visual Workflow and Lightning Flow it also had a massive facelift going from this:

to this:

Intro to Flow Builder (Trailhead Video)

The future of Flow

he immediate future of the Salesforce Flow technology looks promising as Salesforce has on several occasions mentioned their intention for Flow to be the main automation tool for declarative programming (point-and-click) on the Salesforce Platform.

The days of both Workflows and Process Builder are almost over. These two products will still be supported for several years to come but there will be no new development on them.

Salesforce announced at the Virtual Dreamforce 2020 a new product named Flow Orchestrator.

This will allow more complex business processes to be performed by combining flow and other tools. Little information is currently available about this product but it is likely to include Einstein and Mulesoft capabilities.

From the Salesforce official announcement:

Flow Orchestrator is a welcome addition to the process automation toolkit provided by Salesforce. It allows you to bring together a number of different automation capabilities into one, unified workflow. The tool allows you to queue up autolaunched flows and screen flows into stages while providing notifications to the users responsible for those actions and allowing you to route the stages through logical decision steps. By enabling complex business processes to be organized in stages and steps, the orchestration can bring different people with different responsibilities together to get things done. The flow orchestrator will be available with the Summer ’21 release.

Flow Trigger Explorer in Salesforce (new in Spring 22)