Spring is almost here

One of the best things about Salesforce.com is the regular updates to the system. It is pretty much an automated process and rarely requires any adjustments to the administrators end. The biggest thing to do is to download and read the release notes so that you won't be caught off-guard when the changes eventually come to your instance. If you are an admin then they have sent you an email titled "Spring'13 Release Notification" well in advance so you can have your training organization trained before the new release. And it really is important to have everyone up to speed about the coming changes because otherwise you can be sure that you will have a lot of calls to answer when things are a little bit different. :)

Reading the release notes

Don't let the 100+ pages that the release notes have scare you. Odds are you won't be using most of the things in there and they might not have that much to do with the features you are currently using. But it's good to read it through and evaluate which automatic changes affect your organization and what features could or should be activated and how they would benefit you. One good example is right on the second page of the Spring '13 release notes under Chatter. The tasks will now appear on Chatter feed automatically so if you are following an account, opportunity or lead in chatter you will be notified every time someone creates a new task under it. This is a really awesome improvement that helps keep everyone on the same page but more importantly there is a little gem hidden right below it. A small checkbox called "Allow Task Entry in Feeds" in Setup -> Customize -> Chatter -> Settings that will not be active without your input.

You can already try this option in your sandbox by activating it. It is still in beta as you can see in the release notes so you can't fill all the information that your organization might require from the Chatter feed. But if you are already using Chatter actively and need a quick way to add simple tasks then you might find this a really nice feature. The worst limitation at the moment is the fact that if you create the task in the Opportunity, you can't automatically attach it to a contact. So the task will be related to the opportunity but you won't see the contact details under that task. Of course you can fill these in later but even now it should be an improvement. Especially with leads where all the activities are related to just the individual lead and there is no need to specify the account/opportunity/contact to each task.

There are a lot of other improvements to Chatter as well like the ability to search within groups easily and being able to post to public groups without joining them. Detailed information is available on the release notes or the Chatter release training video.

Other noteworthy features

First of all I really feel bad for people who are still using email thinking it is a good way to communicate. But for many businesses it is still a valuable tool and a lot of customer communication is still done via email. There is hope of a better future and with our closest client we already have customer chatter groups that helps the communication a lot. I think the true jackpot of customer chatter groups is still yet to come - but apparently it on the roadmap if my talks with the Chatter developers from Salesforce are anything to go by. The breakthrough that we need is the ability to share chatter groups between different salesforce instances so that you can use your normal login credentials and see the shared customer groups in both organizations as normal shared chatter groups. Not so that the other one has to use special guest credentials. I talked with the Chatter development team in Dreamforce last year and apparently this is definitely on the roadmap but no schedule was given. But it is a very logical and awaited step that would really bring the whole Salesforce.com in to a whole new level. 

Sorry. Back to the features. It's easy for me to get carried away when talking about Chatter and the oppression that email has laid on most of us. That aside, if you are using Salesforce for Outlook in your organization and haven't seen the Salesforce Side panel then you should check it out. It enables you to view Salesforce data right inside Outlook and should make life a bit easier for the email-inclined. 

If you are using cases in you customer service then you might enjoy the possibility of creating custom reports of emails. That should give you a good, reportable insight to how the cases are getting solved via email.

Salesforce touch is improving but it is still lacking one key feature: creating and editing events. That would be one of the most useful features for our sales warriors on the go. We use events to write down the meeting notes from all customer meetings and loving the informative reports we can do with that but unfortunately the iPad revolution is slightly held back with the inability to manage events on the touch interface. Surely we can't be the only company baffled by this? What gives?