Here are some highlights coming in early February to a Salesforce instance near you:
Salesforce for Outlook
- We use a Outlook plug-in that synchronizes Salesforce contacts, events, etc with Salesforce but it is neither Salesforce for Outlook nor Connect for Outlook. The primary driver for going with a 3rd party's solution was the inability of Salesforce for Outlook users to discriminate between private and public Contacts and tasks/meetings. Salesforce has finally addressed this shortcoming, over 2 years since the Salesforce for Outlook plug in was released.
Workflows
- We'll have to see exactly how this works and the limitations around it but one of the potentially more significant changes coming in Spring 12 is the cross-object workflow. Hopefully, we can avoid the need to write triggers for basic field updates. Again, this is one that has been in the pipeline for years and glad to see Salesforce finally address it.
Reports
- It's hilarious to me that Salesforce no longer calls these "reports" but rather has latched onto the buzz around "Analytics". Whatever it is, they've improved the service markedly. The most notable improvements to me are the following:
- You can now run an exception report like "Account without Opportunities". To do this previously, you almost certainly had to export the results of two different reports into Access, Excel, or SQL Server. You'll see this tagged in the documentation under "Cross Filters".
- The other significant improvement should now allow us to create reports like Opportunities with Activities and Contacts. Previously, you could have Parent -> Child -> Grandchild, but not Parent -> Child -> Sibling. Again, we'll see how this actually looks soon, but this is potentially a big improvement.
Apex
- A couple notable changes for developers to keep an eye on:
- The number of schedule Apex jobs has been increased from 10 to 25.
- Test methods can no longer use existing customer data (with the exception of user/profile and record type). This means all test methods will now need to create new data. It looks like they've created an exception but for those of us w/ existing non-compliant code, we'll have to do some retrofitting with the "SeeAllData" property.