Salesforce Reveals some new Summer 10 Features

Today, salesforce.com revealed a sub-set of the new features we can look forward to in the Summer 10 release. Most of these are smaller features, the larger ones will probably be revealed as the release gets a little closer. Even with these being smaller features, there's some good ones in here that jumped out at me.

•  Dashboards can be run as the running user - A small feature, but a big help. As a lot of admins know, if you're trying to roll out personal dashboards, you need to create a dashboard for each user with how it's setup today. With this, all you need is the one dashboard, set to the running user. A big time saver.
• Editable Quote formats for the quote function - Salesforce rolled out quoting in Spring 10, but now we can edit the quote outputs. A natural next step that will allow even more customers to take advantage of quoting.
• Grand Totals in Dashboard components - Again, small, but very helpful. No more clicking down to the report just to see the total

Looking forward to seeing more of the features as salesforce gets closer to the release, but a good start so far.

Salesforce.com Mobile Lite Enhancements in Spring 10

Spring 10 started to roll out last night to a few of the instances. One of the big enhancements with Spring 10 is the upgrade to the salesforce.com mobile lite edition.

•  The biggest enhancement is that you can now edit and delete records from any standard object from your mobile device. Previously, Mobile Lite was read only. This includes leads, contacts, opportunities and accounts - so your basic sales needs.
• Blackberry specific improvements
• Blackberry mobile lite now has wifi support
• Email links are now enabled. This is very nice. Now, from blackberry mail, you can click on a salesforce link and it will open directly to your mobile edition. On the road and have a lead or opportunity workflow notification sent to you? Just click on the detail link and you can see the record right from your blackberry.
• Now supports the new 5.0 Blackberry desktop version
• For the iPhone (which I don't have to see these changes) there are improvements with search and related items which make it easier to locate items not directly on your iPhone.I haven't seen Mobile Lite on the iPhone, so I'll take their word this needed improving.
• Looks like a few new devices are supported, including Windows OS. Still no Android support, but you have to assume that's coming fast. 

Most importantly, Mobile Lite is still free for all versions. With Spring 10, salesforce has really enable this to be a powerful sales tool with no additional charge. This is a terrific way to increase sales user adoption, especially for field reps and should be part of any user training and/or new implementation.

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.