Spring’s the Thing!
Yes dear readers, it’s RELEASE NOTES TIME!! Cue the fun noises!
Click through to access the release notes.
Salesforce has dubbed this the release that will allow you to “Connect to Your Customers in a Whole New Way” – which is fantastic for organizations that are ready to take on all the awesome new functionality that is being released. But I’m here to look past the shiny new stuff (Communities, Chatter Answers, etc) to the bits that are going to matter to all the rest of us.
As always, here’s my bullet points of what I’m excited for in Spring 13:
Salesforce for Outlook Side Panel – This is going to be amazing! It was available before, but is going GA with Spring 13. This is going to dramatically increase the usability of Outlook for your customer-facing users, as well as push more & better data into your Salesforce org. The user experience of Salesforce data in Outlook is fantastic & your end-users will think this is auto-magic.
User-Focused Help – What every admin has been waiting for! Besides the improved navigation of help, there are fourteen new, downloadable guides to help administrators/platform owners do their job better and communicate effectively to other business units.
Chatter for Android – The Chatter app is now going GA for Android devises. (Sorry Blackberry users – still no love for you.)
Chatter Tasks – Speaking of Chatter, with Spring 13 comes a new feature called Chatter Tasks. Similar to how Salesforce added in Chatter Polls in Winter, this will be another option available when posting to Chatter. The task will then automatically be related to the record that you are chatting on & appear in the record’s feed. (This is actually in beta & must be turned on by the sys admin.)
More Chatter – There are some additional Chatter goodies that I think are just some nice general adjustments – more items included in your daily digests (50 instead of 25), better sorting on People lists, more in-app previews from websites (see the release notes for the full list), and email replies to ‘Like’ a post or comment.
Quarterly forecasting – While seemingly a minor change, this is a neat new feature that a lot of organizations have been waiting for.
These are the few items that caught my attention, but I’m sure there are gems that I’ve missed. What are you most excited about for Spring 13?
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