Salesforce.com - Summer 13

There is so much in Summer 13, and even Salesforce.com released updated release notes after initial one. This is not short summary of original release notes – just it is my take or favorites. It can be quick bite for you than glancing 281 page original release notes :)

• Partner portal and Customer Portal are no longer available for organizations that aren’t currently using these portals.

• Salesforce.com encouraging new customers to try Communities instead of Portals

• Publisher Action and Global Action – took some time to understand what it is, then created two standard actions in Account to create contact and case – it makes me able to create case and contact from account page – chatter section. Everything is okay but still thinking about its real benefit.

• Chatter Feed Search

• Opportunity Splits – it’s very interesting feature which supports most of typical sales based incentives related requirements. Some of my customers were asked about it earlier.

• Customizable Price book – It’s separate object now; it has tabs, custom fields, validation and triggers.  Still I feel it should be opened up for lot more customization. Price book should able to map in Account level, so for that price book should be used by default for that Account. Think about a community where end customer login and creating order or opportunity using this concept.

• File Attachments to Idea - is very nice one.

• External Users Can View Reports and Dashboards in Communities

• Apex auto code completion in Developer console

• Record Types in Permission sets – reduces maintaining multiple profiles

• Owner (User) fields can be accessed in cross object formulas – no more workflows/triggers to update the owner detail like email – wonderful.Further I would expect - Formula should have email data type as this using workflow we should able to send email to this formula email field – it will be super-duper one for me!

• New login page – look and feel is good but it doesn’t display the lengthy user name – annoying to the people who has / use several Salesforce account.

• Sandbox Templates – now we can select what to copy and what not. Not sure whether we can just select objects or much more options are there in detail for selection.

• Test methods can be defined in Test class only going forward

• SOQL - The maximum size for a SOQL query has been increased to 20,000 characters.

• Field history tracking deletion – previously history older than 18 months will be auto deleted – now it is suspended. So we can access the history data anytime