In no particular order, here are the new features I've seen:
- Social Accounts - Social Contacts was launched in Winter '12, and now Social Accounts are out. If you're on the B2B side, this is probably a lot more useful as you can track the official company's Twitter or Facebook feeds. Support for YouTube and Klout were also added.
- Cross Object Workflow - This has been a requested feature probably since the day after workflow was released. (I feel old in that I remember that day) You can create a Field Update that impacts a field on a related object. In the screenshot below, I'm changing the Account Type to Customer based on a workflow on the Opportunity. This will reduce a lot of annoying triggers.
- Create Cases from Salesforce for Outlook - Finally, this is released. I don't want to download the actual version from the pre-release, but you can see the release notes for Salesforce for Outlook inside the pre-release. Looks like there's some added functionality in that you can create up to 10 "destinations" for the cases which can be a user or a queue that will own the case that you create. Not sure if this means they can't route through assignment rules, but progress.
- Dates in Dashboard Filters - Impressive that this came out right after the picklist support in Winter 12. You can now add date fields as a filter field on a dashboard. Looks like you can even use the Smart Filters for the dates. In the below screenshot I set it to be able to flip between Current Quarter and Last Quarter. Very useful.
- Lots of Reporting Enhancements - First the good news. There's a slew of new reporting enhancements such as bucketing (on the fly grouping of data), cross-filtering (probably the coolest feature in that you can create limits on a report from data on related objects - like give me all leads with no activities, and a new joined report format. They showed a lot of this off at Dreamforce and it looked great. Now, the bad news. It's part of a new Analytics Edition, which is a paid add-on. No word on the pricing, but if you have complex reporting needs, this is certainly something to look into.
- Chatter Improvements - More Chatter improvements as salesforce continues to invest heavily in this.
- Bookmarks - Users can now bookmark useful chatter posts for future reference
- Chatter Now - The private messaging now has presence, similar to Instant Messaging, which makes it 10X more useful. In the pre-release this isn't connected so I haven't been able to play with it.
- Chatter Influence - All Chatter Profiles now have the Chatter Influence ratings built into them
- "Share" Chatter Posts - Similar to the "re-tweet", you can no share a post instead of having to re-post it.
- System Overview - Handy admin page that summarizes the instance in one easy to read page. An added nice feature that you can now have alerts as you approach limits (storage, user, API, etc.) right on your homepage.
I'm sure there's a bunch more that just aren't jumping out from walking around the pre-release, in particular on the force.com side. I'll post more as things are made public.
