Salesforce.com Winter'11 Highlights

You have to love a company that keeps providing new features.  The Winter '11 release from salesforce.com is no exception. As we've noted in previous articles on new releases, if you are already a salesforce.com customer, you've paid for on-going feature enhancements. Most of the features are deployed in a dormant state, meaning you have to enable them and in many cases, configure them. Get the most out of your investment by leveraging new features as they come out. We had a chance to review the development, platform and application enhancements coming with Winter '11. Highlights we found most interesting for the Winter '11 release follow.

• Chatter Enhancements - There a many enhancements to chatter including the ability to have a daily or weekly digest email sent to you informing you of what is new in your feed. Each user can set their parameters for receiving this email. Additionally, you will want to add the new "Chatter" tab to your application tab set. Reports and dashboards now have Chatter feeds. Post comments to your favorite report or dashboard.
  
• Files Tab - Now you can search, follow and add files in one place. The Files tab allows you to search content and files posted through Chatter (yes - this is new too. You can post files to a Chatter feed).
  
• Salesforce for Outlook - for companies using Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 through a proxy server, this is the solution you want to use. For more information on this new enhancement, see our updated article entitled Outlook Integration with salesforce.com.
• Quote Templates - now include repeating headers and footers, field alignment and rich text. Salesforce has made it easier to add graphics to your templates as well and you can preview the templates as you are creating them.
• Subject field length increased to 255 characters from 80 characters on activities.
• Attachments on Activities - You can now add the Attachments related list to activities.

Service Cloud Enhancements

• Highlights Panel on Page Layouts - Service Cloud licenses only (EE, UE and Developer only).
• Tabs for Items in Console - all items you click in the Service Cloud console display as tabs, allowing you to switch screens without losing context.
• SoftPhone in Console - With Winter'11, you can add your SoftPhone to the console
• Chatter Feeds for Solutions - you can now follow Solutions in Chatter feeds
• Portal Usage Analytics - clients with Customer or Partner portals can workflow site usage rules on the User License object, allowing you to set up an email alert to warn you when your monthly portal logins reach a certain level.
• Web-to-Case limits increased - you can now create up to 5,000 new cases a day with Web-to-Case. The old limit was 500 cases per day.
• Email-to-Case limits increased - previously you were limited to 2,500 email messages per day; now the limit is calculates as the number of user licenses x 1,000. For example, if you have 20 users, you can process up to 20,000 email messages per day.
• Click-to-Detail for Dashboard Components - now certain dashboard components can click right to the visible records and by-pass the summary report.
  

Force.com Enhancements

• New User Interface Header - the search is now a Global Search and has been moved to the header. The global search now searches more places including articles, documents, products, solutions, Chatter feeds, files, groups and people. If you do NOT enable Chatter, your search will remain in the left side-bar and will behave as it did previously.
  
• Set-up and Logout links moved - now under your name
• Restyled Force.com Apps menu - the menu in the top right has a new look and feel.
• Real-Time Reports Builder - out of beta, this feature is now in General Availability. Includes drag-and-drop report columns, better sorting and easier customization.
• Sandbox Daily Refresh - Developer and configuration-only sandboxes can now be refreshed every day (vs. every 29 days as before).  You can also delete unused sandboxes with the Winter'11 release.
• Change Set Profiles - You can now add profile settings to change sets.
• Browser Support Expanded - With Winter'11 Salesforce.com now supports Apple Safari v5.0.x and Mozilla Firefox version 3.6.x.