Monday, May 20, 2013

Summer '13 Cheat Sheet

Source: Salesforce.com

 

 

 

Summer '13 Cheat Sheet

The Summer ’13 release notes are out and it is going to be a robust rollout! Please read on for the release snapshot.

Platform Updates

Chatter

Communities is a great way to collaborate with people outside your company who are key stakeholders for your business.  User can share information including reports and dashboards with external users. Two main uses for Communities are to:
  • Improve Sales by allowing reps to share information with vendors, resellers, partners, and customers.
  • Enhancing service functions by allowing customers to collaborate amongst each other.
Chatter Publisher is the tool bar that allows users to perform actions such as, post comments, share files or links and contribute a poll to a chatter feed. Salesforce has released a new feature to manage actions, administrators can add new actions or modify the order in which standard actions appear. This feature is replacing tasks in feeds (rolled out in the Spring '13 release).
Chatter Topics is a feature that allows user to organize their feed. They can add topics (categories similar to #) to posts. This feature will allow all posts tagged with a certain topic to be filterable to show up in a single feed.

Analytics

Enhanced sharing for Reports & Dashboards. Allows for more flexibility in the security model of Report & Dashboard folders rather than the Profile setting Manage Reports & Dashboards. New permissions include:
  • Create and Customize Reports / Dashboard Folders
  • Create and Customize Reports / Dashboards
Sticky Dashboard Filters remember your latest chosen filter selections. This means that a dashboard will always filter data based on your previous view.

Mobile

Salesforce Touch is a version of Salesforce that’s designed for smartphone devices with touch screens. Some enhancements rolling out this summer are:
  • Ability to see contacts’ Twitter pictures and profiles
  • View Dashboards
  • Access to Communities
  • Viewing data even when offline

Data.com

Social Key - Beta is an enhancement to the Data.com Clean feature. It works with Social Accounts and Contacts so when cleaning your data it also queries to pull down social handles from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Force.com

User Interfaces
  • The Setup Pageuser interface has been updated. It is now segmented into five  high-level sections: Administer, Build, Deploy, Monitor and Checkout.
  • The My Settings have also been updated to show more explanatory categories for the standard user: Personal, Display & Layout, Email, Chatter, Calendar & Reminders, Desktop Add-ons, and Import
  • The Developer Console is grouped into the following sections: File, Debug, Test, Workspace, and Help.
 Formulas
  • Owner fields can now drill down to the Owner's user record to pull back relevant information.
  • Checkbox format is now an option for formula fields for returning a value of true or false.
  • Formula editors now uses monospace format. This should make debugging formula field simpler.

SalesCloud Updates


Quantities can now be used in Forecasting and for Quotas (similar to how they can be used in revenue scheduling). This feature is great for companies that track sales by total quantity sold. I can see it being helpful for the Digital Advertising industry to forecast impressions for their online campaigns.
Opportunity Splits is a feature that has been a long time coming and has been asked for by  at least 85% of my clients. In the past custom applications were required to perform this functionality which required fairly heavy development. This feature will easily allow team selling and credit allocation across multiple users.
Pricebooks are now customizable as most standard object are. The object will allow for custom fields and will have its own standard tab. There are two purposes I see this functionality providing:
  • Companies may have seasonal price books that are only relevant certain times of the year. Custom date fields can be used to specify the start and end dates during which the price book is active.
  • Companies with different business divisions can set up specific page layouts each groups within your organization.
Salesforce for Outlook now works with shared activities. Emails can be added to multiple Lead or Contact records and related cases are now visible in the side panel.

ServiceCloud Updates

Entitlement versioning lets users make changes to existing entitlement processes (milestones) when company business rules change without deactivating or deleting the entire entitlement.
Knowledge Base is getting a facelift, Knowledge One - Beta is now available. Features include SmartLinks. Previously, links in Salesforce Knowledge articles to other Salesforce Knowledge articles were hard coded, causing broken links when the linked article’s URL_Name was changed. Now, when the URL Name of the linked article is changed, Salesforce Knowledge automatically updates the article’s URL based on the channel, adds the site prefix for a public knowledge base, and adds the community name for the community portal.
LiveAgent was a focus in the Summer release as it has many enhancements.
  •  A Live Agent sessions page was added to allow users to find information about support agents’ activities while they’re online.
  • Reporting is now available on we’ve Live Agent chat sessions to view data about your agents’ activity while they support customers.
  •  Previously, Live Agent only tracked transfers that occurred during a chat. There are more options available for Live Chat Transcript Events on the Live Chat Transcript Detail page to allow activity tracking that take place between agents and customers during a chat. 
  • LiveAgent Supervisor page can now view: Chats assigned but not yet answered, ongoing chat transcripts, and send whisper messages (for training purposes).

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