So you’ve got the email from Salesforce entitled: “Prepare for Enhanced Domains Deployment Beginning in Winter ’23 Release“

Hopefully this hot take can break it down for you, and explain what it means. Disclaimer: usually my published pieces are fact checked to the nth degree, and Eli has checked that it is comprehendible and in some form of English. No such promises on this one.

Overview

To be honest, this hasn’t impacted my clients much as they tend to stick on out-of-the-box offerings, including AppExchange products, and I’ve gradually moved everyone over to My Domain over the years, which is a default part of the migration to Lightning, although can be circumvented. Enhanced Domains is severing that tie between the My Domain and the underlying specific Salesforce server.

Why now?

If something unexpected happens and you want to reverse, before Spring 23, it’s a simple untick to “undeploy” it afterwards. After Spring 23 it may not be possible, and it will definitely involved some unplanned interruptions and relying on the grace of Salesforce Support to escalate your request rapidly. Not something I would want to bet on.

Impact

If you’re still on Classic then you definitely need to pay attention. If you have custom integration then you definitely also need to be checking out that everything will work as expected – one customer of mine did have a custom integration via API and that unexpectedly fell over during testing.

The details

From my reading, if things are hard coded to eu1.salesforce.com (or similar), they are far likely to fail from Spring 23 onwards. “eu1” refers to the underlying server farm that the Salesforce org is on, so “na1” etc over in the US.

Instead it needs to be my-domain.my.salesforce.com (e.g. naturallyiq.my.salesforce.com). There are some variations for “my” – Salesforce have released a full list for the different parts of their system, such as Experience Cloud.

At a minimum this will impact: Experience Cloud sites, Salesforce Sites, and Visualforce pages; also custom integrations (one would hope that AppExchange partners are up to date!). In *sandbox* environments it will also impact anyone using Single Sign On.

What to do?

Enable Enhanced Domains in your sandbox and check that everything works. Salesforce have a decent checklist which is worth checking out.

Basically it’s two steps:

1, Head to My Domain within Setup, and click “Use enhanced domains” and press Save.

2, Salesforce does some work in the background and if you come back 15 minutes later, you click “Deploy New Domain”.

All done!

And to reservse this change, in case something unexpected happens whilst testing any integrations, AppExchange products or Experience Cloud? Simply untick “use enhanced domains”. See screenshot below 🙂

Small Organisations

Really cheap and cheerful, but literally don’t sue me as this isn’t best practice: for the very smallest organisations and absolutely no promises. Enable it in production and see what breaks.

Thoughts? Your experience? Feedback? Use the comment space below!

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