Enhanced Table Dashboard Component for Spring 10

I've been playing around with the Spring 10 Pre-release for salesforce.com when I've had some time and one of the features I glossed over in my first post, is the enhanced table dashboard component. This is actually a nice little enhancement. Basically, you can now add another row of data to the table, and using grouping can get some light pivot-table like displays on the dashboard.

The picture below shows how easy it is to setup. You just need to have a chart on the report, where up to the 4 data points you want on the table are in the chart (2 sums & 2 summary fields). Using the setup in the image, you select how you want the table set up.



Here are two examples of how the new table can look. One using grouping, the other simply a list of opportunities with an extra data point, in this case Stage, but now you can add tables like "Top 10 deals" and not only show the Opportunity, but also show the sales rep who owns it.


It probably won't be a hyped feature, but it certainly will help with a lot of dashboards.

Spring '10 Is Coming

The next salesforce.com release - Spring 10 - is coming in early February. Details are starting to come out about what's in there, but the easiest way to see is the free pre-release trial. To sign up, go to https://www.salesforce.com/form/trial/prerelease_spring10.jsp.

Some of the top features seem to be:

• Quotes - The Pilot from Winter 10, is now in full release.
• Answers - Forum functionality within salesforce
• New look & feel demoed at Dreamforce
  
• Rich Text File Type
• Apex Scheduler (much needed)
• Some Dashboard improvements

Unfortunately, looks like the much sought after new Outlook version is only a pilot. To see some more details, go to the Spring 10 IdeasExchange page.