Important Announcement

With the release of Winter ‘23 (around October/November), Salesforce will enforce enhanced domains for every customer.

update November, 2022: Salesforce again extended that timeline to Winter ’24 – your enhanced domain will automatically be enabled in October 2023. In the meantime, you can OPT OUT of the deployment if you are not yet prepared for the original February 2023 timeframe. Watch our quick video to help guide you through the process.  Also make sure to join the online trailblazer group if you have any questions or you can also reach out to your Sputnik Moment consultant.

update on July 15, 2022: Salesforce extended that timeframe to Spring ’23 now – your enhanced domain will automatically be enabled in February 2023, but we still advise you plan for this ahead of that deadline.

What does this mean and why should I care?

In Winter ‘22, Salesforce enabled MY DOMAIN for every customer. This meant that your internal Salesforce platform URL was transformed from NA##.salesforce.com to MYFOUNDATION.my.salesforce.com (replace “MYFOUNDATION” with the name of your actual org).

In Winter ‘23, Salesforce will enable ENHANCED DOMAIN for every customer, which adds a bunch of boring infrastructure and security things (with which I won’t bore you the details) AND will automatically change all of your external URL domains to MATCH your internal myDomain. 

Lol, wut?

Yup, you read that right, if you have any external experience cloud or public sites, that url will change to match whatever you use internally. So if you have a grantee or reviewer portal that shows as “foundation.force.com/grantee” and your internal salesforce login shows as “myorg.my.salesforce.com,” your portal will automatically transform into “myorg.my.site.com/grantee.” You can no longer have 2 different URLs.

Good news! Anyone who goes to your current URL automatically gets redirected to the new url.

Bad news: You lose the ability to have 2 different URLs so you have to choose one to keep as the one to rule them all.

1. 1. Verify which url you want to keep IF your internal and external domains are different (see example above)
   2. If your domains match already, skip to step 4
   3. If your domains DO NOT match, you’ll first need to change your internal my domain to match your desired external domain (in the example above, you would change and deploy your my Domain from “myorg” to “foundation” first)
   4. Test in the sandbox: turn on enhanced domain – again, you lose the ability to have a different internal vs. external domain so your portal sites will automatically update to match your internal my Domain once you deploy your new enhanced domain url
   5. Navigate to the new portal site and directly log into the portal as a user, verify everything is working without issue
   6. Replicate the same steps in your production instance

How long will this take to update and by when do I need to complete this?

Be successful! Enable enhanced domain before Salesforce enables it for you so you can plan your communications to your grantees before you open your next cycle (or at least hopefully when you don’t have a significant amount of portal activity). 

Plan for 2-4 hours of work over the span of 1 week to execute the steps in a sandbox, test and then finally update in production.

How to be successful: plan accordingly and utilize your resources

Do not wait until the last minute: plan to enable enhanced domain manually within the next 3 months (before October).

If you have a current support contract with Sputnik Moment, work with your consultant and plan out a time to enable enhanced domains – we can utilize your existing support hours to accomplish this.

If you do NOT have a support contract with Sputnik Moment OR you are a technical maven, follow these instructions from Salesforce: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?language=en_US&type=5&id=sf.domain_name_enhanced.htm

If you do NOT have a support contract with Sputnik Moment AND you don’t have the bandwidth or desire to execute this update on your own, contact [email protected] and we can send you a quick-project contract to help you make this transition as smooth as possible.

Is there a checklist of everywhere I need to update?

This list is not comprehensive as it can be different for each client, but here’s a list of the most common places to update your URL:

1. 1. Turning on enhanced domain in Salesforce
   2. Changing all hard-coded url references in any of your website and external grantee publications
   3. Changing any hyperlinked url references in any and all templates (in Salesforce and in any other external communication tools) – this includes email and merge templates
   4. Changing any website bookmarks you have and advising your staff and grantees to do the same
   5. Changing the url references in all documentation – both for internal staff training and applicant resources.

Resources:

Salesforce Announcement: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000358662&type=1

Salesforce guide: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.domain_name_enhanced.htm&type=5