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Its here! Sales
force Winter '10 from salesforce.com has hit the shelves. akaCRM loves this release! For those of us that are already salesforce.com users, life just keeps getting better and better. For those of you that have been waiting, there is no better time than now. Like all releases, there is something for everyone in this release. Find efficiency and productivity tools for sales users, marketing team, executives and managers, administrators and developers.
Here are just some of the newest features that we really like:
- Custom Help on Standard Fields (All Editions) - We've been waiting for this one for a really really long time. For years, administrators could add help hover text to custom fields throughout the application. But alas, no such functionality was available for standard fields. Having deployed thousands of projects with salesforce.com, we can tell you that for many standard fields (e.g., Account Type, Stage, etc.) each of our customers has different guidance or instruction for their teams. Consequently, this "tribal knowledge" was provided in the initial user training, but was easily forgotten, misunderstood and new employees missed out on the guidance. No more! With Winter '10, administrators can add instructional help hover text for most standard fields. Want akaCRM to update all or parts of your help system? Give us a call.
 - Combination Charts (All Editions) - In previous releases, even though you had multiple calculated summary values in a report, you could only show one metric on a chart. With Winter '10, you can now create combination charts. For example, with a combination chart you can add a line graph on top of a vertical column graph. For example the line could represent % of quota attained and the vertical bar could represent the absolute dollars. Each metric is measured on a separate axis. akaCRM is capable of helping you evolve your reports and dashboards to provide you insightful analytics.
- Extended Mail Merge Enhancements (All Editions) - Did you know that you can mail merge multiple documents from salesforce.com at the same time? What if you need to print mailing labels, envelopes or other documents with personalized information? From the Mass Mail Merge function, you can now select multiple records, Accounts for example, even from different pages and have salesforce.com send you a zip file containing each of the merged documents. If you do any type of paper-based mailings, you must learn this feature! Let akaCRM show you how.
- Campaign Summaries (DE, EE, UE) - With the Winter '10 release, you can now create up to five roll-up summary fields on the Campaign record to summarize the status of the campaign's members. For example, imagine running a telemarketing campaign to invite prospective customers to an event you are hosting. Assume further that you have Campaign status options of "Not Contacted", "Left Message", "Will Attend", and "Declined Invitation". With this release, you can now create summary fields on the Campaign object give you running totals at a glance: Not Contacted: 25; Left Message: 10; Will Attend: 65; Declined Invitation: 12. In our experience, Campaigns is an under-utilized feature of the salesforce.com platform and a very powerful one. Contact akaCRM and ask us to show you how to deploy Campaign functionality for your organization.
- Package Anything (All Editions) - If you ever created an package for the AppExchange to share privately or publicly, you know how annoying it was that there were items you couldn't package. Page layouts for example. It was great to be able to create custom fields to add to the Account object, but you had to manually drag the fields onto the page layout. With Winter '10, you can now package List Views, Page Layouts, Record Types and Validation Rules on standard objects. Previously, these components were only included for custom objects. Have an idea for an AppExchange allocation to market to others, contact akaCRM and let help you achieve your dreams.
 - Process Visualizer (DE, EE and UE) - Previously in limited release, this feature is now generally available. The Process Visualizer provides you a graphical view of your workflow and business processes for a easier view and more clear understanding of what is happening. Salesforce has very powerful workflow and business process capabilities. Let akaCRM review how these can be applied to your business processes to increase your efficiency and improve your results.
Also in pilot or beta with this release are Real-Time Quotes, Apex Code Scheduler (DE, EE, UE), Sandbox to Production (EE, UE) and Look-up Filters (All Editions). In all, the Winter '10 release notes total 125 pages of enhancements. Contact akaCRM to learn how we can put these features to work for you to improve your results. |
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