Salesforce's Winter 12 Features Announced

On the heels of Dreamforce 11, salesforce has just published the Winter 12 release notes. If you were at Dreamforce, it won't come as a surprise, but this is a big release. All in all, there are 150 new features in this release, and a lot of big ones. Here are some of the highlights.

• Analytics Enhancements - Coming out of Dreamforce (more on my Dreamforce thoughts in another post), this is what I was most excited about. Starting with this release, there is a terrific roadmap of new features for reports and dashboards, which is going to be a big win for customers. Just to name a few of the new ones in Winter 12:
  
  
  
  • Dashboard Filters - Tired of creating a clone for a dashboard just to get a cut on a different metric, like Region or Industry? Dashboard filters allows you to add a filter to the dashboard, that when changed, applies to the filter to all the dashboard components. A small, but terrific feature. For now, it can only be a picklist, lookup or text field. (let's hope date fields are close behind)
    
  • New Reports Tab - A slick re-design of the Reports tab. The image shows it nicely, but essentially it combines Reports and Dashboards into one place to find and run them. An enhanced search has also been added for those customers with lots of reports or dashboards. A few other additions helps admins manage the folders and creation a bit better, so all around a good addition.
  
  • Visualforce Charting - This is a pilot, but salesforce showed it at Dreamforce and it looked very slick. Essentially, visualforce reports are much easier to build as there are now pre-built components for reports and charts which means you won't need to start from scratch building them.
  • Reports are now in the Recent Items list
  
  
• Chatter Enhancements - As expected, there's a few new Chatter enhancements, but I almost see this as the next level of Chatter. It's no longer just a feed.
  


• Chatter Messages - Messaging and Presence now built directly into salesforce. This is a big collaboration enhancement, as now users can see if someone is logged into salesforce, and send them a private message. Just another step to allowing the team to remain in salesforce to get all the information they need.
  
• Customers in Private Chatter Groups - Your Customers (or Partners, which I think is even bigger), can now be invited into private and secure Chatter groups so they can collaborate with your salesforce users. Share files, posts, messages, etc. just like you would with a normal salesforce user. Best of all, it's free.
  
• Chatter Approvals - Approvals can now be managed through the Chatter feed

• SiteForce - Salesforce showed this off at Dreamforce 10, and it's coming live in Winter 12. Too many details to cover here, but essentially, SiteForce is a CMS editor to create pages for Sites easier. Currently, if you want to really change your portal look and feel, you'd need to create visualforce pages. With this, you get much more flexibility in what you can customize, and from the look of it, the ability to do it a lot easier than visualforce.
  

• Social Contacts - Directly from the Contact record, you can now view a Contact's Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin feed. This is the next step in Salesforce's push to "socialize" the enterprise and I can see where Radian6 will step in soon to enhance this even further. For now, this is simply a way to view the feeds, as long as you know your contact's user ID for these services. Speaking of which...

• Data.com - Jigsaw is now called data.com. First, one of the big announcements at Dreamforce was that Data.com now contains a subset of D&B information. This is big. Previously, Jigsaw was great for contact data, but pretty poor around Account information. D&B was the exact opposite. Now, with one service you can get the best of both, completely integrated with salesforce and with the ability to make it even more powerful with API access. This is becoming a must have if you do serious lead nurturing or outbound calling. In addition to this announcement, there are a few new enhancements within salesforce, including the ability for users to save searches and improved exporting. Finally, back to the Social Contacts. With salesforce.com's focus on the "social enterprise", it is clear that Data.com will be making a strong push to start capturing company's and contact's social accounts as well as their email and phone.
  

• Forecasts - A revamp of the Forecasts feature. A new, impressive looking UI, and some nice improvements to the usability. From the notes, it's hard to tell if it is more flexible though, which has always been the biggest issue.

• Salesforce for Outlook now supports Outlook 2010, including 64 bit. Still no ability to create Cases from an email though.

• CTI 4.0 - Of course, this doesn't mean the phone vendors will support it just yet, so may be a lag before you can take advantage of this. Biggest part of this is it now supports Chrome as well the Mac - again, you need your phone vendor to upgrade before you can use this.
  

Winter 12 looks like a well rounded release with a few big enhancements and a lot of smaller enhancements to really fill it out. After the somewhat light Summer 11 release, this is one we're excited to get our hands on. Can't wait for the pre-release instance to get more details on some of these items. As always, we'll post more as we find out.

Update: The pre-release is now out: http://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?c=09a30000000D9xtAAC&id=08730000000aDnTAAU

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.

Follow everything related to your account with Account360 Chatter

Empower your Sales Representatives to be aware of everything happening related their accounts. Whether it's a high priority case being opened for their account, or a new opportunity being created by an overlay sales team, or even a maintenance contract expiring, they need to know of these changes so when they are speaking to that customer next, there are no surprises. Salesforce.com's Chatter is a perfect tool to receive the notifications, but currently they would need to follow not only the account, but all records associated with that account to get the Chatter feeds.

That's why we've developed Account360 Chatter. With Account360 Chatter, simply by following the account a user can:

• Receive Chatter notifications for any new record created on an account. This includes Cases, Opportunities, Assets, Contracts and even custom objects.
• Receive filtered Chatter notifications for updates to these related records. Only want to know about High or Critical cases? With Account360 Chatter, you can create a filter for that.

We've just released Account360 Chatter - Cases on the appexchange. Account360 Chatter - Cases is a free app that will create a Chatter feed for all new cases created for an account. Again, this is a free app, so please give it a try.

If you're interested in getting the full functionality of Account360 Chatter, please visit GearsCRM and we will get back to you within 24 hours or call us at 1-888-817-5764.

Details of salesforce.com's Spring 11 release coming out

Right on the heels of wrapping up Dreamforce, salesforce.com has begun to make official some of the new features that will be part of Spring 11. This list is evolving as salesforce flags some of the Ideas posts (a few new ones were added today), so be sure to keep checking. Some of the highlights so far include:

• Salesforce for Outlook Improvements - A couple of new features for the new Salesforce for Outlook that should allow users to finally move off of the old version. Attachments from an email can now be saved in salesforce, and you will be able to associate the email with other objects, like cases and opportunities. It still remains to be seen if we'll get the button to create a new case back, but hopefully. Currently it's still flagged as "under consideration".
• Google Chrome support - Google Chrome will be officially supported! You could get away with Chrome up until the new dashboard and report builders came out and Chrome became a lot less usable. Official support will fix all of this. I'm curious if this also includes CTI support through Chrome.
• Report & Dashboard Improvements - Some quick hits are coming on the reporting side. Dynamic Dashboards will now by able for all Enterprise and Professional editions. At Dreamforce salesforce also announced they will be bumping up the number of dynamic dashboards allowed per instance, but they don't have the official numbers just yet. In additional, salesforce is adding a search function to the filter field list. Extremely useful feature for selecting the columns, so this should help a lot for the filters as well. 

On a related note, salesforce has also announced the process and timing to get hold of a Spring 11 preview sandbox. This is a great way to get hold of all of the new features before the official release.

We'll post more as new features are announced. As always if you'd like help with salesforce, or more information, please visit our us at www.gearscrm.com.

Join us for GearsCRM's Dreamforce Happy Hour

After a long day of break-out sessions, kick off your Tuesday evening at our Dreamforce Happy Hour at the B Restaurant and Bar above Moscone North. Drinks and food will be on us, along with our partners CodeScience and Glance. This will be a great opportunity to relax, meet the GearsCRM team, and also get to know some of your peers from other companies we've worked with over the past year.

Click here to RSVP

Where:
B Restaurant and Bar (upstairs above Moscone North)
720 Howard Street
Yerba Buena Gardens
San Francisco, CA 94103

When
Tuesday December 7, 2010
5:30-8:30PM PST

We look forward to seeing everyone there!

Lead Scoring with Salesforce.com

There are several ways to handle lead scoring in salesforce, including using formula fields or building apex triggers, but one of the easiest is the Force.com Lead Scoring App. This is a terrific app that Salesforce Labs have built, and best of all, it's free.


How does Lead Scoring work?
The Force.com Lead Scoring app is a simple packaged installation from the appexchange. Once you have it deployed in your instance, you'll see an app in the top right drop down for "Lead Scoring". Select this, and you can start.

The first step is to create Lead Scoring rules. The lead scoring app has a simple interface that allows you to enter in each rule and the criteria for the rule.

Entering in a Lead Scoring Rule

For each rule you create, you simply need to enter in the type of rule, how many points the rule is worth if it is met, and then the criteria for the rule. For example, if your company targets Technology companies, you could enter a rule that says if the Industry equals "High Tech" for a lead, that lead gets 25 points.

Now, one of the best features of the lead scoring app, is not only can you score off of values from the lead, but you can create scores based on Campaign Membership that the lead is associated with. Have a very important email campaign that you want to make sure the responses go to the top of the list? You can set the score so a Response to that campaign is worth any number of points and have it moved to the top of the call queue. The lead scoring is cumulative, so a lead can score across multiple rules. In total, the application supports up to 200 separate rules, counting both leads & campaign member rule types.

Overall, for a free application, this is a tough one to beat. The fact it can support lead & campaign member type rules, and can have up to 200 rules immediately makes it much more robust then something you can do with formula fields. The ease of which you can add new rules couple with an easy interface to activate and deactivate rules as needed makes it an easy choice over custom code if your business rules support it.

Parting Tips
If this is something that interests you, here are some quick tips we've found when deploying this with our clients.

• Get your business rules down first. This app makes lead scoring very easy to implement, but you still need to understand your business to come up with rules that make sense. Be sure to map that out before rolling this out. That said, you could easily implement this in stealth mode and use it as a way to collect data, before doing a full roll-out. 
• Don't try to be perfect the first time. While it's important to understand your business and roll out a good rule set, it doesn't need to be perfect. Lead Scoring inevitably leads to surprises and hidden gems of lead segments that you never realized were such high quality. A tool like this helps you adapt quickly as you uncover these changes. In addition, the lead scoring app includes a simple button that allows you to re-score all of your leads as you make lead scoring modifications. 
• While the interface for lead scoring only allows you to select one lead field at a time, you can create more complex logic by creating a formula field, and then referring to that with the lead scoring rule. If you have a rule that needs multiple criteria to be met (High Tech companies with over $1B in revenue for example) the formula field is the way to go for that
• The scores update each time you edit the lead. Be sure to include qualification data that your sales reps are trying to collect when they speak to your leads into the model. This way the score is adjusting as you learn more about your leads.
• Finally, don't be afraid to use negative score values. Sometimes the best result is knowing who not to call. If there is a segment that you know is not worth the resources to pursue, assign them with a negative score and have them removed from your call queues.

Winter 11 - Salesforce announces some of the upcoming features

Salesforce has begun updating their Ideas site and tagging some requests as coming in the next release (which is Winter 11). On their official blog, they have announced this is real, and are showing off a few of the features coming out. This isn't the full list, but a few big ones are already listed.

•  Outlook Edition - Salesforce spoke about the new version of the Outlook Edition edition back in Dreamforce, and it looks like its finally coming as part of Winter 11. This looks to give the user much more control over what they sync, as well as provide some automation of what emails are sent to salesforce. This update has been needed for a while, so this will be a welcome feature.
• Report Builder - A re-design on how the report wizard works. At Dreamforce last year, they demonstrated this as a drag and drop wizard that lets you see the report as you build it on the fly. No more 7 "nexts" to walk through to build the report. Should be a big time saver.
• Dynamic Dashboards - We talked about this in our post about Summer 10, but it didn't make it in the release. Looks like it's part of Winter 11 for sure. This will also be a big time saver - no more dashboard needed for each user.

I'm also hoping the next version of the console, which is in beta now, makes it into this release, as I've heard good things about it. We'll post more as more features get announced.