http://ideas.salesforce.com/popular/coming_in_winter_09

One of my (and probably your) pressing needs is the ability to display fields from related objects (e.g. show the Account Number on the Opportunity page). Before Summer ‘08, you had to either use Workflow to copy a value over, embed an s-Control to pretend the field is actually on your object or tell users to use the hovers.

Cross Object formulas take care of this.  I decided to see how far it went. To start my test, I added a custom Lookup field from Accounts to Cases. I then created a Formula field on the Licenses custom object that I have in my org. My formula traversed the following relationship path:

1. From License
2. To Contact
3. To Account
4. To Case
5. To Contact
6. To Account - finally displaying the City from this Account

It worked! My resulting formula was:

sfLma__Contact__r.Account.Case__r.Contact.Account.BillingCity

I could’ve kept going through more relationships too.  The field selector that’s provided made this simple.  Just click click click and you’re done.

This fills a huge gap in the product.  This simple addition eliminates a big reason for having needed external reporting tools.  This handles the traversing “up” relationships (from detail to master), while the custom Report Types rolled out last release handled the traversing “down” relationships (from master to detail).  Combined, they solve a lot of reporting problems.

I can’t begin to tell you the headaches this bit of functionality will cure.

(UPDATE: The Summer 08 Landing Page was published).

I suggest you check it out. Some new functionality that I find particularly intriguing:

Visualforce is Generally Available

Visualforce is now available for all organizations in Group, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions.

This is huge. There is A LOT to learn in this area.

Analytic Snapshots

Analytic snapshots enable users to run a tabular report and save the report results to fields on a custom object … and schedule when to run the report to load the custom object’s fields with the report’s data.

It sounds kind of like exporting the data to Excel, but will instead let you export it to a custom object. This is cool because you can then report on data “at a point in time”.

MultiDay Events

Users can now create events that end more than one day (24 hours) after they start, lasting up to 14 days.

This is a new convenience for end users. Hopefully it syncs well with Outlook calendar.

Enhanced List Views

Inline Editing

If your administrator has enabled inline editing for your organization, you can now edit single records directly from a list view by double-clicking on individual field values. If your administrator has granted you the “Mass Inline Edit from Lists” user profile permission, you can also edit up to 200 records at a time with inline editing.

Custom Paging

You can now change the number of records displayed per page of list results by clicking the record count indicator in the lower left corner of the list and selecting the desired setting.

Drag-and-Drop Customization

You can now change the order in which a column is displayed by dragging the entire column heading with your mouse to the desired position.

Customizable User Object

Finally, we can have page layouts, set field level security and more on the User object.

Cross-Object Formulas

Refer to fields on related objects in your formulas. Even use the formulas to display fields from related objects right on the UI. For example, put the Account Number field on the Opportunity page.

Apex Enhancements

Lots of stuff here. Read the release notes for details.

Many-to-Many Object Relationships

In Summer ’08, you can now create two master-detail relationships on a single junction object to make it easier to represent a many-to-many relationship in your data model.

This will help in development. These junction objects have always been tricky from a user experience standpoint.

Lots of things to digest here. I only captured a handful of things that stood out to me personally. Go see for yourself.

http://www.salesforce.com/products/spring08.jsp

A little URL hacking later and I came up with the feed to follow what’s coming in Spring ‘08.

http://ideas.salesforce.com/xml/rss?tags_string=coming_in_spring_08

The steps to do it are easy. Go to http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Early_Access_Program to learn more.

One of the really nice additions to the release notes is a section in the beginning called Summary of Winter ‘08 Features and Impact on Salesforce Users. It is a table with a row for every major new feature and tells you, at a glance, which ones have immediate user impact after upgrading. This is critical for admins so they can communicate things prior to the upgrade. For example, in the Winter ‘06 Release, the UI changed for all customers right after the upgrade, which necessitated communication beforehand. If you are an admin, you should review that section to see if you need to do anything prior to the upgrade.

Some of the more exciting features (in my opinion) are:

• Campaign Sharing: Finally, you can treat Campaigns like you do any other object and use sharing rules to drive security. This will provide major benefit to sales people because you can now open up Campaigns for them to use as a List Management feature. It will also, obviously, provide marketing benefit as they will be able to distribute the management of Campaigns throughout the Marketing organization without worrying so much about someone having too much authority.
• Group Tasks:
  

  “You can create a task so that up to 100 users are each assigned an independent copy of the task.”

  This takes the Create Tasks for Entire Team AppExchange app and puts the functionality native into Salesforce with a much better user flow.
  

  “To build a list of users you want to assign to a newly-created task, open the assignee lookup on the New Task page and click the Multiple Users tab in the lookup dialog.”

• Field History Tracking Available on Accounts and Contacts
• Product Search Enhancements: This will make the Add Product screen on Opportunities configurable in a number of ways.
• Printable List Views: This will allow you to nicely print your Salesforce views. This will be handy for people that don’t want to deal with using a report, exporting to Excel and then tweaking the “Printable View” of a report in Excel.
• Floating Report Headers: The ever-popular idea is getting implemented.
• Inline Editing: Edit a record without refreshing to an Edit page! This should be a major productivity enhancement and save lots of click/wait time. Once it’s out, I am certain people will be clamoring for it in related lists.
• Tagging: Tags are private for every user, allowing a user to categorize (”tag”) records as they please. When clients of mine have migrated from ACT!, they always missed the Group feature there. Tags will allow user to do this in Salesforce. For this release, the tags are private to the user. I imagine this will change in the future with functionality to allow teams to collaborate through the use of tags. Tagging will probably not have tremendous take up from the masses, but savvy users will pick it up and usage will grow over time.
• Apex Code for Enterprise Edition: It’s an additional fee, but at least it’s an option. It speaks to Salesforce’s confidence in its scalability.
• Many API improvements. One of particular interest to me is:
  

  Developers of AppExchange packages can specify whether or not to restrict the API access of components in the package for greater security. Installers of AppExchange packages can view the API access given to components of a package they are installing, and after installation can modify that access.

  This means that you could download the Arrowpointe Maps package and restrict it so that it only has read access to the objects you want it to. You can tighten up the security on all your installed apps. Even if the app you download already does this, the end customer has the ability to restrict it further.

• Related Object Fields in Formulas: You can now reference “joined” fields in some formula areas such as Workflow Rules, Validation Rules and Escalation Rules. For example, you will be able to have an Opportunity Workflow that fires when an Opportunity is Won and the Account Type = ‘Prospect’.

  With this release, you cannot use joined fields in a formula field on an object. For example, you cannot create an Opportunity field that shows the Account’s Rating on an Opportunity record. The closest thing to being able to do this is using the hover feature, but the hover feature is limited to detail pages and the recent items list..

All in all, a pretty nice release. I am looking forward to it. Feel free to comment with your thoughts.

Anyway, I have been going through the Release Notes and have found some nice little enhancements that aren’t necessarily “big news”, so I thought I’d point them out. For the major changes, I would suggest going to the Summer 07 landing page.

• Merging Contacts or Leads on Campaigns
  

  …when you merge duplicate contacts or leads that are members of different campaigns, the campaign date for each is retained and associated with the newly-merged contact or lead.

• Specify the Number of Records to Display in Report Results: Just like in Dashboards, you can now limit the records returned in a tabular report. Also, if you specify this value, you can now use that tabular report in a Dashboard.
• Opt-Out of System Maintenance Notifications
  

  With Summer ‘07, administrators can go to Setup | Company Profile | Company Information to prevent advance notices about planned system maintenance or downtime from displaying to users when they log in.

• Recycle Bin for Deleted Custom Field: Will save some people from major grief.
• Report on API Usage
• Workflow rules and actions can be packaged in an AppExchange app
• Data Loader can export data from Relationship Fields
  

  To do so, use a SOQL query in your export request that includes fields from a related object.

• Compliance BCC Emails: Force all outbound Salesforce emails to BCC to a corporate address without the ability to override by the end-user.
• Delegated User Admins can now login as the users they support just like the regular Sys Admin can.
• Record Locking
  

  If two users are editing the same record simultaneously, the user who saves the record first will have his or her changes saved, and the second user will receive an error message and be prompted to reload the record with the changes made by the first user.

• Formula-based worklow rules
  

  When defining entry criteria for workflow rules, you can now use formulas that include calculations and multi-field comparisons, letting you create complex workflow rules. For example, you can leverage formula functions such as ISCHANGED and PRIORVALUE to build rules based on field value changes.

• Dynamic selection of email alert recipients
  

  Send email alerts to any related user, contact, or email address that appears in any custom or standard field on the object specified for the email alert.

These are ones that are of particular interest to me. If you want to point out something you learned about that is buried in the details, but might be relevant to others, please post a comment and let us know.

As mentioned on July 5, Salesforce has a Summer ‘07 landing page that provides detail for the developer features and more.

It looks like a rather large release. It’s pretty impressive, I must say. Some of the nice features that jump out for me and past clients are:

• Intelligent Workflow: Use formulas as workflow criteria are a big highlight. Other improvements as well.
• Extended Customizable Help: Include help hovers next to a field where you can include a short bit of help text.
• Lookup Hovers: No need to drill into an Account from a Contact to view its data. Hover over the Account link and see a mini page layout of Account data. I personally think it’d be better to include joined fields onto the Page Layout so you don’t even need to hover, but this is still an improvement.
• Extended Mail Merge: Mail Merge has been one of those features where the answers to commonly asked “Can it do…?” questions is “No”. Well, some improvements were made. First and foremost is the ability to create a Mail Merge for more than 1 person at a time. Also, mail merge will have cross-browser support. No need to fire up IE just to use Mail Merge anymore. This feature needs to be enabled by request to Salesforce.
• Extended AppExchange Packaging: This will be helpful for my Info Center application since it is an unmanaged package. If you uninstall an old version in favor of a new one, you will be able to export the data, uninstall, reinstall and import the data back in.

If you want an early look at Summer ‘07, you can sign up for a pre-release account and see it all in action in your own sample org.

And the logo winner is…

Thanks to Salesforcewatch and CRM FYI for actually letting me know about the landing page even before Salesforce blogged about it.

This idea really encompasses two features - referencing parent fields on a child, and rolling up child information to a parent. The latter of these is on schedule to be available with the Summer ‘07 release! Stay tuned for more information in the coming months!

The ability to create formulas that COUNT, SUM, MIN, MAX, etc. values from child records will be huge. It will especially huge if conditions can be added within that. For example, from an Account, you might have a formula field to SUM(all Won Opporortunities from a particular Lead Source). Another might be to simply SUM(all Won Opportunities).

Until the release notes are out, we won’t know exactly what this functionality will (not) do, but it’s exciting to know some aspect of it is coming. This will save users a lot of time from having to run reports to get this information and it will save developers a lot of time having to create those reports!