We've moved

We've moved our blog directly onto our website. Please go to http://gearscrm.com/gearsnews for more posts related to salesforce.com and GearsCRM.

GearsCRM is Hiring

GearsCRM is hiring multiple positions for our New England and Chicago based practices. We're looking for smart, energetic and self-motivated team-members that want to work with some of the best companies in the area. Gears is growing quickly, and we're looking to add the following positions:

• Apex & Visualforce Developer - Ideally in New England, but the position is virtual, so anywhere in the US will work.
• Solutions Architect - New England and/or Chicago areas.
• Project Manager - New England and/or Chicago areas.

If you'd like to learn more about these work-from-home positions, please email us at jobs@gearscrm.com. 

Salesforce Summer 12 Release Features

It's that time of year again. Salesforce.com Summer 12 is around the corner and the release notes are out. No single major enhancement this release, but rather a slew of small to mid-size ones, which is actually how I prefer it. There's a ton in this release, so I won't go over everything, but here are some of the ones I'm excited about.

• Chatter Enhancements - As always, a bunch of new features to make Chatter even stronger.
• Chatter Messenger - I mentioned this back in our Winter 12 features post, but that was a bit premature. It's now fully available and adds a Chat interface to salesforce. I've been playing around with it in our sandbox, and it looks interesting. Will be curious to see how it starts to replace traditional IM like Skype among salesforce users.
• Streamlined Feeds - A small, but very nice feature. You no longer will automatically receive Chatter notices when we create a record. I always felt this cluttered up the feed, so now you can select the records you want to follow to keep your feed clean.
• Improved Posting - A bit of a better UI for posting Chatter. Makes it easier to post Files and Links.

 

•  Relate Multiple Contacts to a Task - Quite possibly one of the biggest request we've heard clients asking for over the years and we'll finally be able to associate multiple Contacts on a single Activity record.

• Improved Opportunity Products - A few quick UI fixes to selected Opportunity Products which are much appreciated
• Keep Selections when scrolling - Huge improvement. Now, when you select a product and then hit the Next or Previous page, salesforce will remember the products you selected on the previous page. No more having to add it to the opportunity to go look for your second product.
• A-Z links - Similar to Views, Products now has a A-Z links list
• Display more than 25 - Again, similar to views, you can now show up to 200 products on a page

• Multimedia in KB -  Another pretty popular request, we can now add multimedia to KB articles. Using the new HTML editor from Spring 12, you can now insert an <iframe> function into an article which will allow embedded video HTML code from YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion. Expect this to be expanded greatly over the next few releases, but a good start.

•  Live Agent Improvements
•  Live Agent in the Service Console - Live Agent was moved to the force.com platform in Spring 12, and is now embedded in the Console itself for Summer 12. Great to see Chat Agents able to take advantage of the Service Console now.

•  Live Agent Supervisor Page - Single location for Supervisors to be able to see all of the Queues and Agents and what the backlog is, number of active chat sessions, etc.

•  Analytics Improvements - Building on the new features in Winter and Spring 12, we get even more reporting and dashboard improvements in Summer 12.
•  Cross Block Formulas - Powerful new feature that let's you do formulas across multiple reports in a joined report. Great for ratios and other type metrics.

•  New Smart Filters - Great new feature (and long overdue). Some new smart date filters are now available including "n years ago" or "next n months". 10 all together that will let your reports be much more dynamic.
• Charts can now be added to Joined Reports
• Drag & Drop to move reports into new folders - Should save admins some time on their report spring cleaning projects
• Modify all Grouping and Summary items for a dashboard - Before you had to do this on the report so the dashboard would pick it up. Now you can pick and choose these right from the dashboard component

•  Salesforce Touch - It's still in beta, but the ipad app is extremely slick. If you have an ipad, enable this for your org as it's very useful. This will be improved greatly over the next few releases and we can't wait.