Salesforce Open CTI Retirement (Feb 2028 EOL): Telephony Migration Strategy
Salesforce's announcement in February 2026 regarding the complete retirement of the legacy Open CTI framework by February 28, 2028 has sent ripples through the contact centre industry.
For organisations currently running iframe-based integrations—specifically the open-source Amazon Connect Salesforce CTI Adaptor—this represents a critical migration window. This is not simply a version change or a toggle interface update; it is an architectural modernization of how telephony and CRM interact.
The Legacy Problem: Open CTI (Task-based Bridge)
Historically, Open CTI acted as a lightweight browser bridge. It rendered the telephony control panel inside a standard HTML iframe in Salesforce:
- Separation of Voice and Data: Telephony events and audio streams remained isolated in the external phone system.
- Basic Task Logging: Call logging was limited to creating a standard Task or Activity record containing basic metadata (duration, time, direction).
- No Real-Time Intelligence: Because Salesforce had no direct access to the live audio stream, agents could not benefit from native real-time transcripts, sentiment analysis, or CRM-driven next-step recommendations.
The Modernization Model: Service Cloud Voice (Native Voice)
Salesforce's replacement framework, Service Cloud Voice (SCV), shifts telephony from an external frame to a native platform feature:
- Native VoiceCall Object: Calls are captured using a native Salesforce entity (
VoiceCall), which serves as a unified workspace for call logs, transcriptions, and recordings. - Omni-Channel Routing: Routing is unified under Salesforce Omni-Channel, ensuring that phone calls, emails, and chat queues are balanced across agent workloads.
- Real-Time Data Streams: Audio feeds are streamed live (via AWS Kinesis) straight into Salesforce for real-time transcription and generative AI assistance (Agentforce).
Why It Requires a Professional Migration
Transitioning from Open CTI to Service Cloud Voice is a full-scale integration project:
- Rewriting Custom Event Overrides: Custom screen pops and routing hooks must be converted from Open CTI's JavaScript commands to the Service Cloud Voice Toolkit API.
- License and Security Redesign: Moving to SCV introduces add-on licensing requirements and requires configured IAM roles to support transcription streaming between AWS and Salesforce.
- Omni-Channel Re-alignment: Call queues must be re-architected to avoid double-routing conflicts with native digital channels.
CloudInteract is an AWS Advanced Partner specializing in Salesforce CTI Modernization. We help enterprise contact centres audit their technical layouts and safely transition before the 2028 deadline.