Salesforce Spring ’11 is now upon us and I would like to share my top favorite enhancements or new features. I will be covering the basics, as there is too much to go into in one post. I will cover some of these in more detail in future posts so stay tuned.
My favorite has got to be Criteria-Based Sharing for Salesforce Professional edition or above. The standard sharing rules only allowed for “all or none”. If you wanted to share a record with someone that was not in the sharing rule, you had to manually share it. Now, you can create sharing rules based on criteria like list view or report filters. I see an explosion of picklist and checkbox fields in the future!
Salesforce for Outlook (Salesforce Professional edition or above) is getting more powerful. You can now add emails to any object and it now supports adding attachments. In the past, when you added emails and attachments, the emails were added as tasks and the attachments were added to the Notes & Attachments related list. Now, the attachments are attached right to the task. They are so much easier to find now!
Full support for Google Chrome is now available for all editions. I remember the days when Firefox had limited support. It is nice to have a choice of browsers since I work in my production, sandbox, and developer editions (all at the same time most of the time). Now all I need is more screens and a few more sets of fingers!
Dynamic dashboards for Salesforce Enterprise Edition and above. It used to be that you would build a dashboard and then clone it for each running user. Now, with Dynamic dashboards, you can select the logged-in user as the running user. Each user sees the data as if they were the running user so no more cloning! Also, managers can pick the running user from a picklist in the dashboard so they can look at each of their subordinates without switching dashboards.
Chatter Invitations are now available for all editions. Now you can send Chatter invitations straight from the People tab or Chatter Central. Let’s get the whole company collaborating, instead of just the Salesforce users!
I hope I have increased your appetite for these new features. Personally, I am quite excited about them and I always look forward to the new releases. It’s kind of like getting birthday presents three times a year!
Be sure to stay tuned as I will be covering these and the other features deeper in future blog post.
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