Make your Salesforce Project More Successful by Inviting a BA to the Party (Or Thinking Like One)


Today I welcome my good friend, Garry Polmateer as a guest blogger at CRMFYI. Garry is not only a Salesforce community rockstar, but he's planned and executed some great Salesforce implementations,

A Little Help from My Friends


In a demonstration of community and collaboration, Mike Gerholdt and I have created a blog post / demo video of utilizing inline Visualforce to display rich text info in standard page layouts without

Chatter-vantage #1 - No Need to Rush the Stage


Salesforce has created a conference attendee experience using Chatter that blows away all other conferences. Their Dreamforce Attendee Portal allows attendees to connect with speakers before, during

I Need You; to Join The Salesforce Channel Community


If you follow me on Twitter, it's hard to miss my regular status updates like,  "21 videos were posted to The Salesforce Channel today," but what's that all about? The Salesforce Channel is a website

Calling All Heroes! You Belong at Dreamforce


Earlier this year, I wrote about being a hero to your users, and the gist of it was that through social media, you can surround yourself with fantastic people who will make you a hero to your users. I

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» idea exchange

Summer 09 Sets Sail this June with Features You Want and Need

Posted on May 11, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, Ideas, News, Productivity, Service and Support | 8 Comments

 

Summer 09Excitement 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.

Case Sharing

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

Workflow Visualization

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.

Chart Analytics

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