CRM FYI

Excitement builds around three times a year about what goodies Salesforce will deliver to their users via a painless application upgrade.  A few months before a release, you get some glimpses from the Idea Exchange of what’s coming, but then about a month before the release goes out the door, you get the final Release Notes that detail all the stuff they’ve been working on.  Summer 09 is coming this June and has a good dose of enhancements and new features.  Let’s take a look at a few highlights.

Case Sharing with Salesforce to Salesforce

A few years ago, I worked with some companies who were forming something they affectionately called coopetition.  They were some technology companies like HP and Storagetek who knew that when their joint customers had issues, it was not always so cut and dry whose problem it was.  These vendors used a technology platform to share telemetry about their joint customers and keep from finger-pointing between the vendors.  Case Sharing in Salesforce to Salesforce is similar to that.  Two companies who both use Salesforce can work together to immediately share selected case information that can ultimately help the end user get resolution faster, and with more accuracy.

Workflow Visualization

Sometimes a picture explains something much better than words can.  With Summer 09, you can now see your Salesforce workflow processes graphically and explain your workflows better visually, from start to finish. 

I had a chance to see this feature and try it out during the Usability Testing phase of development and I have to say it’s going to be a real help in documentation of more complex processes.  Besides, there’s always someone in the crowd that wants to see your diagram, and now you can get the exact, up-to-the-minute one, right inside Salesforce

Chart Analytics 2.0

Two of the long-missing chart types in Salesforce have been the Donut and the Funnel.  Now they’re both available to you and much rejoicing can be heard at the Idea Exchange from the many people who voted them up.  Other significant additions to Reports and Dashboards in this release are values displayed on charts, new colors in charts, available color-blind-safe colors, and a slightly different look to the Dashboard panels.  Let’s call it some very useful additions, but nothing particularly mind-blowing.

Misc.

Lots of other features can be found throughout the Release Notes, but here is a summary of some you may want to look into.

• Significant changes to both iPhone and BlackBerry app (including the availability of Salesforce Mobile Lite for free, if you didn’t know about that already)
• Automated multi-wave Campaigns
• Generic from-email address support
• Sharing setup UI enhancements
• Enhanced declarative logic for picklists
• Sites usage reporting
• Search result ordering
• SAML 2.0 support
• UI option to help load detail pages more quickly
• Auto complete of User fields with Users in your Recent Items list
• Mexican Spanish and Romanian language support