Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com has been very responsive to both my post here and my Support ticket even though it’s not a show stopper issue. Problem not solved yet, but I give them credit for being on top of my issues.

I completed the training session this morning/afternoon and the system was stable the entire time. So far so good with the Winter release in terms of stability.

I got through all of the reports I complained about in my previous post of about 30 minutes ago. I went to test them and noticed that some of the columns I added are not there. I went back in, thinking I did something wrong, and added them back. When I re-ran the report, the columns were still missing! Weird thing is that some columns did make it into the report. The only ones that did not seem to take were custom fields. Standard fields that I added did get saved. Help!

I tested this issue in both IE and Firefox. It’s something on the server side.

I wanted to see if anyone else is having the same problem I am with the Salesforce.com Winter ’06 release…

I did a lot of work on Reports this past Friday for a training session I am conducting on Monday. I went into the upgraded config and noticed that all of my report changes made Friday are missing. It’s strange. Other configuration changes like Field Level Security changes made it, but the reporting changes did not. The changes I made on Friday were for reports that were created a few days ago, but I had gone through each of them on Friday (about 20 in total) to adjust columns, filters, etc. in order to standardize them across different user groups. All of those modifications made Friday are missing.

Anyone else have an issue with this?

The Winter release is scheduled for this coming weekend. There is some new functionality that will be available right away that requires no work on an Admin’s part. If you are an admin, you should either be ready to make config changes over the weekend when the system is back online or you should communicate the changes this week to prepare your users for the change. This is especially important if the Admins are on West Coast time and will not be available to field support calls/emails while their East Coast and European colleagues are online:

• The Salesforce UI is getting a new look and feel. Everyone is being defaulted to the new UI. You do have the ability to change it back if you’d like. Go to Setup | Customize | User Interface and select the “Salesforce Classic” User Interface Theme. This change is Organization-wide. Rather than changing it back, I would suggest keeping the new UI and communicating of the change to your users this week.
• The “New…” links (New Account, New Contact, etc.) are moving from a bar under the tabs to a drop down box in the sidebar.
• Users will be able to create recurring Events. It’s pretty self-explanatory on how to do it.
• The Reports tab will be improved with the ability to search for a report based upon keywords in its title or description. A “Recent Reports” sub tab will also exist on the Report UI for easy access to recently run reports.

Some of the “Editions” are being upgraded. As an admin, you should do some testing of these prior to rolling them out to your users:

• The Outlook Edition is getting updated. I suggest testing this prior to rolling it out to your users. Outlook Edition 2.0 looks to be a combo of the old Outlook Edition and the Intellisync offerings.
• The Offline Edition is getting updated and improved. This one should be pretty straightforward to upgrade. Don’t forget to remind your users to synchronize their current offline databases before upgrading. We wouldn’t want any hard work they’ve done offline to be lost! It is possible that the new install will “upgrade” the old install vs. uninstalling it and installing the new one, thereby maintaining the offline data even if the user doesn’t sync before upgrading. I haven’t tested that, however. To be on the safe side, sync first.

I’d be interested in hearing about your experience with the Winter ’06 upgrade. Please comment on this post regarding issues, tips, thoughts, etc.