October 19, 2012

Salesforce.com Winter 13 Features – Sneak Peek View


Almost all instance of Salesforce.com now have Winter 13, it is just my quick view summary on features released on winter 13.

Geo Location: Allows you to create a custom field that identifies a location by its latitude and longitude, though it has some limitations – it has great feature in analytics.

Chatter Polls: Provides more influence and easy options to choose the preference to all end users of the application. 

Chatter Preview Link: Salesforce.com completely goes social, what about all of it’s customers, I see most corporate using proxy and blocked most of the social sites like Youtube, Vimeo etc. So I see most of the end users will be blocked message set by the corporate proxy level.

Chatter Desktop: Chatter Desktop now has Chatter Messenger, so we can chat like as we use any traditional messenger!

Opportunity Team: It is very much expanded – now, we can create custom fields, buttons and links, page layout, validation rules and triggers, multi line layouts. It helps to track lot more details in the team level. It definitely brings smiles to most of my customers. Compare to other objects it still has some limits like we cannot have workflows, lookups to opportunity team from other object – still provided expansion is great in winter 13.

Shared Activities: One task can be associated with more than one contact, but only one will be primary.
Email Drafts and Approvals: Thinking about approval process to send emails, now we can do it in Salesforce.com

Further now we can have Exportable joined reports, introduced Salesforce Touch and lot more enhancements in Data.com

Org Wide Permission Sets: Now we can create permission sets without associating with any specific user license.

User Sharing: It allows to grant Read/Write/Read only access to any user. It is great start, the reason to say this previously we cannot provide this access to anyone particularly. To grant this permission we were pointed to “Customize Application” permission that is more than what needed to the particular end user.
Still salesforce.com has way to go to independent some of the administration task without having permission to customize application or modify all data.

Developer Console: Now we can create and run the test methods, has option to select specific test classes as well. Check the test method coverage and update right here.
Query Editor – We can write a query and run it in Developer console, more over we can point to the record and make edit or delete the record right here.

Compare to any earlier release Winter 13 has lot of Pilot feature, not sure why so many Pilot released or Salesforce.com going to take pilot based release approach for new features like Connected App and Canvas, Environment hub and lot more.

Visualforce Charting become GA on this release.

As I am not hard core developer who code every day, didn’t get in to more details on codes and methods related features introduced on this release :)