With every new release of updated features from Salesforce, there are a handful of exciting improvements we can’t wait to use internally and share with our customers. As for Spring ’12, we’ve decided it’s the simple changes that will make the biggest impact.
Learn more about Spring ’12 features and release dates by viewing the Release Preview on Facebook.
Essential Productivity Improvements
Associate multiple contacts with a task
Though it is still being tested, Salesforce is inviting users to try this new function of logging one task and associating multiple contacts to it. What a time-saver! Say goodbye to redundant task entries… go on, get excited. We are.
You’ll need to contact Salesforce to enable this feature, as participation is limited.
Expanded report filters
Ever thought you’d need more than 10 field filters on a report? It sounds like a lot, but when you have complex data to analyze, 10 filters can seem a bit restraining. Salesforce has extended that option to 20 filters. A simple update, but definitely useful. Best of all, in Spring ’12, this feature is automatically visible to users with no setup required.
Social Additions
Social Accounts, Leads, and Person Accounts
As we saw in Winter ’12, Salesforce brought social media to Contact records to offer a more personal view of the people you interact with. To expand on that concept, now Accounts, Leads, and Person Accounts have been updated with the same features. This requires a bit of setup for each object, but will make a big impact with an increase in sales, improved customer service, and better relationships with clients.
(Note: Contact us about bringing Twitter feeds into your Account/Contact/Lead records!)
YouTube and Klout for Social Accounts and Contacts
Learning more about your customers will get even easier (and more interesting!) with this new feature for Accounts and Contacts. Clicking the YouTube icon on an Account detail record will pull up video results for that company. Also, viewing Klout scores on your Contact records will help you to determine who has a large social influence – make sure you interact with them regularly, as they will voice your brand and help increase your reach as well!
This feature is not automatically visible and requires some setup
Collaboration Cloud Updates
Files in Comments
It will be much easier to collaborate on a project with the added ability to upload files in Chatter comments. After all, there is not always one piece of media associated to a subject or project. Files can be attached from Salesforce or from your computer. Added bonus: this change requires no setup!
Bookmarks
Have you ever scrolled down your Chatter feed and caught a few posts you wanted to read, but didn’t have time? Now you can tag posts in your feed that you’d like to revisit later. With all the files in comments, attachments, and inline YouTube videos that have been made available in the past releases, it’s no surprise that reading a conversation between colleagues could take several minutes. This feature will be available and ready to use as soon as your instance of Salesforce has switched over to Spring ’12!
Did we leave anything out? Feel free to share your favorite new features released in Spring ’12 by commenting below, or Tweet at us! @icsfdc
We want to hear from you!
January 10, 2012 at 1:13 pm
If I can chime in on my personal favorite change? We’ll be losing money on small triggers for clients, but we’ll gain speed and versatility/flexibility with Cross Object Workflow.
In the past, we could only run field updates on the selected object (generally) but with Cross Object Workflow, we can effect change on other objects. Say for instance something happens on the Case object and we want to change a field on the Account object. In the past, NO. In the future, YES!
My .02
-Chris
January 10, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Thanks for the response, Chris!