- Salesforce is getting massive. I mean, between the Sales & Service features, Chatter updates, API changes, and all of the new ".com" products like Data.com, Work.com, Desk.com, and Social.com, it's a wonder that anyone is able to keep anything straight, including Salesforce employees.
- Chatter keeps getting the lion's share of enhancements. Since 2010, it seems that every quarterly release is stuffed with Chatter updates with a few core CRM improvements thrown in to keep the masses happy. I've been doing Salesforce.com work since 2008 and only know of a few clients who use Chatter regularly. I understand the academic appeal of Chatter but given the realities of email in business, can you really believe that integrating a canvas app into a Chatter stream is more valuable than providing a true M:M relationship between Accounts and Contacts or providing a better and more flexible Salesforce/Outlook/Exchange plug-in?
Without further delay, here are some notable features coming our way in middle October with Winter 14:
User Object Sharing
I was surprised to find out that this object was not previously governed by sharing. There are some interesting use-cases where you'd potentially need to hide/share user details. Curious to see how this works if the org-wide default is set to Private with Chatter-enabled orgs. Also notable, Apex managed sharing is not supported for this object.
Approval Emails with Comments
This is one of those "duh" features that has taken a backseat to Chatter. Finally, you can add the approver's comments to an approval email notification without having to build some trigger or vf-based email.
Embed a report within a standard detail layout
I would also categorize this under "duh". Finally, remove the link to the report and just put the report in the layout. Much better, though it seems there are some limits, such as, only 2 charts per layout.
Configuration-only sandboxes are being renamed to "Developer Pro" and will have storage limits bumped up from 500 MB to 1 GB. Developer sandboxes will continue to be called "Developer" but will also get a bump in storage from 10 MB to 200 MB.
Developer Console
I do most of my development in Eclipse but if I'm away from my laptop, I use the developer console as it is a vast improvement over the standard code editor. A couple highlights here:
Have you ever had a complex process to debug? Well, you probably ran into a log limit, right? Just before discovering the source of your headaches, you see text like "Log limit reached"... ugh! You can now override log levels for a specific trigger or class. So you could turn logging down by default and then turn it up on the class or trigger where you suspect the problem resides. Sweet!
One new feature that caught my eye was this debug tool in the console. It looks like it will graphically display the order of execution. Very nice!
Visualforce Updates
VF has some HTML 5 updates that should prove useful. One that stood out to me was the new <apex:input> tag. You can specify the type by using a "type" attribute. The browser, using HTML 5 standards, should render the input based on the type. One use case where this should help is with input dates. If you needed to provide a date input, without binding it to a Salesforce object's field, you had to do some hokey workaround to get the date picker to display. Now, you should be able to just do something like <apex:input type="date">.
There is also support for a "list" attribute to add to the input tag. It looks like this should provide visualforce with some autocomplete capability that you could previously do with some jquery magic. For picklists, we'd typically generate a list in the controller, then bind the list to VF through selectlist/selectoption tags. I guess we'd use the input tag and list attribute in cases where we'd need the autocomplete on and where we wouldn't need some of the selectlist/selectoption features like displaying but disabling values.
Apex Changes
The maximum number of code statements has changed from being a flat number to CPU time-based. Previously this was 200k, which is suprisingly easy to hit, when you have some nested loops. The new limit is based on whether you are synchronous or asynchronous (batch Apex). They've advertised this as removal of a limit, but in reality, they've just changed how the limit is computed. Seems like it'll be harder for a developer to anticipate CPU utilization.
The new Database.getUpdated() method allows you to pass in the object, and the start and end date/time and will return to you a list of updated records. That should be useful!
There is a new BusinessHours static method that allows you to pass in a date/time and an id to a Business Hours object to see if something is within the business hours and to fetch when the next available business hours start. That should be handy.
Other
Environment hub?! I need to see screen shots to determine the actual utility, but it potentially sounds useful. Particularly if you are an admin for multiple orgs with multiple instances.
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When the changes are actually applied to my personal sandbox, I'll do some mockups of some of the new VF stuff. Stay tuned.
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