Salesforce Summer 11 New Features Announced

Salesforce has opened up the pre-release of Summer 11 and with that come the release notes describing all of the new features. We haven't seen a release date yet, but here's a look at what's coming in Summer 11:

• Chatter Enhancements - Lots and lots of new Chatter changes. This is the third release in a row that has been Chatter heavy, but that's not surprising considering the amount of effort salesforce has ut into it. Here are some of the Chatter highlights:

• Chatter Favorites - Finally a way to flag important Chatter announcements as a Favorite, and be able to find it quickly after
• Chatter in List Views - A handy feature that allows you to view the chatter feeds of records in a list view. Each view now has a toggle that allows you to switch between the view and the Chatter feeds from those records. You can also follow/un-follow records right from any view now
• Chatter Files - You now have the ability to allow a person or group to have collaborate permission on a file you share from Chatter.
  
• Dashboard & Report Enhancements - A few quick but good updates here:
• Multiple Field Selector - No more dragging and dropping one field at a time on the report builder. Thankfully you can now grab multiple ones and pull them into the report at the same time.
  
• Calendar Drop Downs - On filters, if it's a date field, we now have the calendar drop down
• Chatter Snapshots - We can now push Chatter Dashboard Snapshots to a group feed
• Speed Improvements - The report builder preview loads faster now too. It was a noticeable improvement
  
• Enhance Profile User Interface - We saw this at Dreamforce in December and nice to see it make it in. If you have a lot of profiles in your account, this will be a big time saver.
  
• Jigsaw - All accounts can now see a Jigsaw tab and do searching for Jigsaw contacts. You can't get at the phone or email info with the free version, but users can search to see what data is there. It's basically a free preview account in all instances.
  
• Sync Tasks with Salesforce for Outlook - You can now sync tasks with Salesforce for Outlook. There are some nice editable filters around the age of the tasks that let you customize what sync as well. We still don't have the Create Case button back. Vote to get that back on Ideas.
• Workflow and Approvals for KB Articles - This is useful especially if you're writing KB articles in a group. You can now use the approvals or workflow process before you submit KB articles for publication and support other flows.
  
• Custom Sidebar Components for the Service Cloud Console - We don't know a lot of accounts using this yet, but this will let you really extend out the Service Cloud Console which came out 2 releases ago. You can build new components using the Service Cloud Console Toolkit and visualforce.

Overall, not the biggest release we've seen, but there's some good stuff in here. I suspect there will be a big Winter 12 (or maybe even Fall 11) release on the heals of the next Dreamforce and that will be a big one.

Also, it's not part of the Summer 11 release, but they also just released Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook v4 app which now integrates Facebook posts into the Conversations object.