My Take on Salesforce.com Spring 14

It’s just my take, not covers entire release features –consider as quick bite in Developers and Architects stand point. 

Reference: salesforce_spring14_release_notes.pdf 

Pilot: 

Skills:

• It seems Skills allows users to share information about their professional expertise. With skills, users can discover, collaborate with, and endorse others (LinkedIn impact!) based on their knowledge. 
• Expecting this would be available as child to user and appear in User’s related list. 
• I was implemented similar functionality using custom object and code and as child to contacts since user object page layout won’t allow related list, no endorse though! 

File Sync 

• It provides features to access files and keeps it sync between desktop, mobile devices and chatter. If anyone enables Salesforce1 and File Sync must be enabled to get most benefit out of Salesforce1. 

Flow trigger  

• New workflow action called a “flow trigger” introduced, which launches a flow when the workflow rule criteria are met. 
• For example, suppose you have a flow that looks up and assigns the relevant entitlement for a case. You can create a flow trigger to launch the flow whenever a case is created, so that all new cases are automatically set with a default entitlement.

Allocation of API Limit

• It enables to limit number of API calls to various applications.  
• It may help to prevent API limits are not eaten by non-critical apps, have heard numerous time that Data loader eaten up all API limits as some developer set very low batch size.  

General Enhancements: 

Topics

• Enable topics for objects to allow users to add topics to records. Adding topics helps organize records and makes them easier to find. Additionally it can be used to filter the records in list views. 

File Storage

• File storage limits have increased from 612 MB to 2 GB per paid user license. 
• For Example - Enterprise Edition organization with 600 users receives 1,211 GB of file storage, which is 2 GB per user multiplied by 600 users plus an additional 11 GB. 

Mobile Enhancements: 

Salesforce1 

• Enterprise class mobile app gives access to same information. It can be downloaded from App Store and Google Play. The Salesforce1 app uses your organization’s Salesforce edition, user license types, and assigned user profiles and permission sets to determine the data that’s available to each user. In most cases, users see the same objects, record types, fields, and page layouts that they do when working in the full Salesforce site.
• Users can view and switch between communities and their internal organization from the Salesforce1 app
• Appearance can be changed to match your company’s branding.
• View embedded chats in record detail page. 
• Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile images can be displayed in Person Accounts, contacts and Lead as well now. Seems LinkedIn only demands to be logged in. 
• Lot more features, possibly business users won’t be waiting to go back office to access Salesforce.com normally through browser. It happens to have separate section in Release Notes to list How Salesforce1 difference from full Salesforce site!

SalesforceA 

• Mobile App for Salesforce.com Admins – way to go! Hope it might receive lot of welcome by Administrators. 
• Supports to perform – Edit user details, Password reset, and assigning Permission sets, activate / deactivate / unlock users.
• It can be connected to Production and Sandbox too! 

Communities 

• Now users can give, receive, and create badges without any additional licenses!
• Salesforce1 supports Community 
• Can send private chatter message 
• Orders are now available as standard object and accessible in Communities 
• Accounts and Contacts are accessible to Community users – whatever is shared. 
• Interestingly, data loader can be used by Partner Community Users.
• Now users can give, receive, and create badges without any additional licenses!
• Salesforce1 supports Community 

Sales 

• It seems forecasting can be down in multiple ways – almost using four different types. 
• Orders is now Standard objects, it looks like comes with Order products and option to connect with Contracts and Accounts. 
• Further Price book also integrated with Orders. It seems very tight integration – one order can have only one Price book and if price books selected it cannot be modified. (Very recently we have implemented Order management functionality which was completely custom – even if happened to do same project after Spring 14, we might have to go Custom implementation as standard has these price book gaps and miss lot of automation) 
• Order designed like Contracts – when it comes activating and deactivating Orders. 
• Place Order REST API will be more flexible for custom development and Integrations 

Services

• Solutions field “visible in Self Service portal” here after labelled as “Public”, hope it might have same API name as “IsPublished”. 
• Business hours can be applied to Milestones and Entitlement process 
• Knowledge is available as widget and footer in Console. 
• Live Agent – now as a pilot, files can be uploaded / transferred to CSR agent by end users. 
• Direct to Agent chat – Chat that originated from a particular button can be directly routed to a specific Agent. 
• Very important to notice that Salesforce.com mentioned retire of support for Salesforce.com CTI toolkit. This toolkit helps partners build adapter programs for call center users to install on their machines to integrate Salesforce with computer-telephony integration systems. Salesforce encourages moving to Open CTI. 
• Portions of a console from browser can be moved to any locations on the screens and can do pop out as well.
• Social Customer Service – It integrates with Radian6 so service agents can engage customers by responding to cases created from Twitter and Facebook

Analytics 

• Now there is an option available to exclude the standard footers in report export to excel / CSV file. It will remove the Report Name, Copy right and generated by user Information. 
• View All Data not required now to edit dashboard components and save the changes as the current running user of the dashboard, even if you’re not the running user. Until now, you needed the “View All Data” permission to edit a dashboard in place of the running user if you were not the running user yourself.
• All the capabilities of the Analytics REST API are also available in the Apex API. What it means we can use Apex to automate a reporting workflow. The Apex code takes a report ID and message as input, runs the specified report, and posts a Chatter message / send as email. Charts can be included in visual force page by just passing the report id in
• History Tracking for Cases – for example we can watch Status and Priority field which frequently changes. 

Force.com 

• The Data Import Wizard provides a unified interface; data can be imported from just one place. 50,000 record limit will be remain as same. 
• Partial Data Sandbox – Provides option to select specific object (standard & custom) records to copy over – maximum of 10,000 records per objects and 5GB of attachments. A Partial Data sandbox is a Developer sandbox plus the data you define in a sandbox template. It includes the reports, dashboards, price books, products, apps, and all customization under Setup.
• New User interface for monitoring deployments.