Day 3 was governance and control.
The morning was the technical sessions, and they went deep. What the SDKs look like. What Agent Script and its open harness look like. How you actually wire up the things they have been promising all week. Then the part that matters if you are the one signing off: once it is set up, what are the levers you can pull to give really fine-grained control over who can reach what inside the system?
I liked that more than any demo, because it answers my biggest concern about opening up a headless state, where the interface moves out and the org is reached by an outside client. The concern is a user ending up with more access than they should have and creating headaches nobody intended. The sessions today were about exactly those levers, and they are fine-grained enough to take seriously.
The conversation I keep coming back to happened between sessions, with Adam, about a pattern we both see in client orgs. A lot of organizations use page layout required fields as their data validation. The field is required on the screen, so a person cannot save the record without it, and that is the whole rule. There is no validation rule behind it, and the field is not required in the metadata. That holds as long as every record comes in through a screen. The moment an agent writes the record without opening the page, nothing enforces the requirement, because the requirement only ever existed on the layout. Those organizations are going to find the transition hard, and most of them do not know it yet.
Which is why one thing caught my eye. In one of the sessions I saw a tool they are rolling out that lets users see some of these potholes in advance, while they are building, before anything rolls out. That tells me Salesforce thought through the implementation of this and not only the use of it. A fresh takeaway, and in my experience an unusual one for Salesforce.
So the day, from where I sit: the platform is getting the controls, and the controls are real. The work that is still yours is knowing where your own org is being held together by a page layout. The tool will show you some of those potholes. It will not fill them.
Adam’s Day 3 dispatch, from the Keyboard, is here.
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