Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I have had a chance to take a sneak peak at the Summer 05 release and I was very impressed with it.

Custom Formula Fields

They are impressive and work just as they are being marketed. However, they do not yet support aggregate functions so you can SUM or COUNT data from child records. I hear that is coming in a future release to expand on the functionality. The report formulas work great too.

Multiforce

Multiforce seems pretty cool. There is a new link under the Extend part of customforce called “Custom Apps”. Salesforce and Supportforce are listed by default. This is where you can create additional Apps and assign tabs to them. Then, in Profiles, you say whether or not the Profile has access to the App.

Self-Service Portal

I also noticed a new tab that isn’t written about in the release notes called “Portals”. When I clicked on it, it was a new tab for managing your Self-Service portal. This tab has some key reports right on it and a preview of the portal itself. Configuring the portal allows for more granular capabilities such as changing fonts and colors on each portal page and for various objects across pages like dropdown boxes or the mouseover characteristics of a tab. It is simpifying the management of a stylesheet. In fact, there were places I could click “Advanced Setup” and it actually had a text box with the information that I could edit straight up.

Mass Address Update

Works great. Piece of cake to use. Will help improve data quality greatly.

Customizable Related Lists

Work just like the customizable ones on custom objects. In a page layout, you highlight the related list to configure and click the “Related Lists Properties” button. Make your adjustments and voila.

I didn’t get a chance to test Customizable Forecasting, Sales Methodologies or Email to Case.

All in all, I’d say Summer 05 looks good and developers will be much happier working with it.