Krishna Prabhakar
Chatter
Salesforce Communities- Generally Available!
- Starting in Summer ’13 Customer and Partner Portal goes away and Salesforce Communities comes roaring in.
- With Communities you can:
- Creating public pages in your community that don’t require login
- Customize error pages
- Creating a custom login page for external users of your community
- Communities does require a license and has two options – Customer Community, and Partner Community. This is an exciting leap for Salesforce- nomenclature aside, I think this feature will companies who implement it a whole new level of engagement and interaction options that were just not available by logging in through a portal. It will be interesting and exciting to see how forward thinking, customer-centric companies use this and their success stories at this year’s Dreamforce.
Chatter Publisher Actions
- Don’t think Chatter is the future of Salesforce? These features will have you thinking otherwise!
- Create actions let users create records. They’re different from the New button on object tabs and the Quick Create and Create New features on the home page. Create actions respect your validation rules and field requiredness, and you can choose each action’s fields.
- Custom actions are Visualforce pages with functionality you define. For example, you might create a custom action to let users write comments longer than 1000 characters.
- Chatter Publisher Actions feels like a more baked option than we have seen- it comes with a page layout editor, and actions are customizable. I see this feature only growing in upcoming releases.
Do More with Chatter Email Replies
Bookmark, Follow, Like, Unfollow, UnLike, Respond to a Chatter Message. You may ask why I include this as an exciting feature- fair enough. As Chatter becomes the tool for the future of Salesforce it will be more dependent that you and your organization adopt and become proficient in the tool. To do that, you have to engage people and right now that takes email. Drawing them into the tool is the first step, and that’s exactly what this is meant to do.
Opportunities
Introducing Opportunity Splits
I can’t say it any better than this “Opportunity Splits lets users split credit across opportunity team members. Multiple team members working on an opportunity can roll their individual sales credits into quota and pipeline reports for the entire team. There are two types of opportunity splits. Revenue splits provide credit to team members who are directly responsible for revenue that an opportunity generates. Revenue splits must total 100% of the opportunity amount.Overlay splits provide credit to team members who work on an opportunity but aren’t directly responsible for generated revenue. Because these splits aren’t limited by the opportunity amount, they can total any percentage (sometimes exceeding 100%). ” So let’s just soak that in! As a former sales professional, this is just plain freaking awesome!
Customizable Price Books
Seriously this is like Christmas in April “you can customize fields, page layouts, record types, and much more.” For us veteran Admins how long haven’t we waited for this? Oh, and they finally added a Price Books tab! You know it’s the little things that bring an Admin joy.
Service Cloud Console
Updated Interface
Let me list what’s better- Font, Spacing, Color scheme. Just look at this work of art. Need I say more?
Analytics
Fine-grained sharing for Report and Dashboard Folders
Finally some much needed updates to how Reports work. Now Report and Dashboard folders can have Viewer, Editor, or Manager access. Be sure to check out the release notes and the handy guide for deciding permissions that Salesforce gives you. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of thought and time went into this, and as a result Admins will have to do some homework to get transitioned over- but I think it will totally be worth it!
Force.com Enhancements
Improved Setup User Interface
The good news- it’s pretty sweet. The bad news, all that training documentation, help videos, set up guides, and emails you toiled over since you were a Salesforce Admin will have to change. But think- no longer is it Your Name | Setup | Blah, blah, blah. It’s just Setup.
Permission Sets
Now include Record Types
So in a word they just got even more Awesomer! “With record types in permission sets, you have the flexibility to layer record type assignments to users as needed, without having to create additional profiles.” If you don’t use Permission Sets and our buried in a sea profiles, then let me tell you now is the time to get after it. Fewer profiles is the way to go, and permission sets gets you there.
Formulas
Owner Field in Custom Formulas
Honestly, at some point you will read through the release notes and wonder when the goodness will end. Well, I’m on p. 196 and it shows no sign of slowing down. “In Summer ‘13, we’ve opened up the Owner lookup and made its fields available for cross-object formulas.” Just think of all the great things we can accomplish now that we have access to Owner fields 