Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I am taking a break and will be back again towards the end of March. I will be missing all the happenings for the Spring ’07 release. A few of the cooler items in the upcoming release are:

• Customizable Search Results – you can go a step further than you can today and add Filters. This allows the end user to perform a generic search and then perform additional filtering on the search results without having to re-search. (Wish this was added to Views, so users wouldn’t have to create a new View everytime they want to filter for something.)
• Time Based Workflow – Allows workflow events to be triggered based upon time passing. Looks like the timing can only be in Days. Hopefully, hours will be implemented as an option in the future.
• Email Approvals – accept/reject your Approvals from your email client rather than having to log into Salesforce.
• Rich content Solutions – allows you to document you Solutions in HTML format using a WYSIWYG editor. (wish this was on Activity comments too or, even better, as an option on all Long Text fields).
• Enhanced Data Model Customization – allows you to create lookup relationships between Standard Objects, create recursive relationships on Standard Objects, etc.

I look forward to catching up on the new release when I get back. It’s not as grand as the Winter ’07 release, but it’s encouraging to see another release take place so quickly afterwards.

If you submit comments to the blog while I am out and don’t see them published on the site, now you know why. Have a good March!

As Mark mentions, Salesforce has a landing page for the Spring ’07 release.

• Feature Detail Pages
• Admin Preview (PDF)
• Detailed Release Notes (PDF)

Of course, the landing page is your best place to start.

The Decoding Salesforce blog has a good post on working around the formula compile size limit. In short, it’s a way to span your large formula across 2 formulas and compile them in a particular sequence so Salesforce doesn’t realize its over its limit. Nice hacking!

I think this workaround may be needed less in the future, however. I am quite certain that the formula field compile size is getting increased to 5K with the Spring ’07 release.

This post only applies to relationship fields (lookup and master-detail) that went through the Winter ’07 upgrade.

If you plan to use SOQL relationships in queries that have custom relationships to other objects, you should go and edit your custom relationship fields to include a Child Relationship Name. This allows you to use a user-friendly name for the relationship when querying the master object.

Going forward, this field is set for you. However, after the Winter 07 upgrade, this field was left blank on all relationship fields. Without making this update, SOQL relationships will still work, but you will be forced to use an archaic value for the relationship name. That archaic value will look like a Salesforce ID.

The Salesforce online help has very good documentation on relationships, but here’s a quick example.

Suppose you had 2 custom objects before the Winter 07 upgrade: Quote and Quote Line. Quote Line has a relationship field called Quote, which sets a master-detail relationship between quote (master) and quote line (detail). After the Winter 07 upgrade, the Child Relationship Name on that relationship is null. You need to update it. To do so:

1. Go to your custom object (Quote Line in this example)
2. Edit the Quote relationship field
3. Provide a value in the Child Relationship Name field

Doing this allows you to make a query like:

Select q.Name, (Select Id, Name From Quote_Lines__r) From Quote__c q

To get this setup correctly in your org, you should go through each object and make sure this is set for all custom lookup and master-detail relationship fields. You’ll probably use SOQL relationships someday. May as well fix it now.

In April of 2006, I blogged about the need for Salesforce to adopt a new licensing scheme to accommodate a license to the platform only. In that post, I described what I felt to be the necessary components of the platform in that licensing model.

I remember hearing people at Dreamforce mention that this could become a reality soon, but I don’t recall hearing anything specific about it actually being deployed. However, I am seeing some hints in the application now that it’s been upgraded to Winter 07 that elude to it being a reality.

• There is a field called License Type on the user record. This defaulted to “Salesforce” for all users (as far as I know). The Help explains that there are now 3 potential values here.
• Salesforce License: Designed for users who require full access to standard CRM and AppExchange apps
• Apex Platform Licenses: Designed for users who do not need standard CRM functionality. Users with an Apex Platform user license are entitled to use custom apps developed in your organization or installed from the AppExchange. In addition, they are entitled to use core platform functionality such as accounts, contacts, reports, dashboards, documents, and custom tabs.
• Apex Platform One Licenses: Designed for users who are entitled to use only one custom app developed in your organization or installed from the AppExchange. The app is restricted to five custom tabs. In addition, they are entitled to use core platform functionality such as accounts, contacts, reports, dashboards, documents, and custom tabs.
• There is a new standard App called Platform. This includes the Accounts, Contacts, Reports, Dashboards and Documents tabs.
• In the Company Profile screen, there is now a list of Licenses for your organization. A record exists for each of the 3 license types I mention above.

I cannot find very much information on how one can buy an org with Apex Platform Licenses only. The ability to purchase a platform-only license like this would be huge. It would obviously provide a platform for companies to build apps on even though they aren’t interested in CRM (yet). It would also instantly provide a very solid, configurable back-end to a web application. This would compete with the MySQLs, Oracle’s, etc. of the world. A benefit over those guys is that you have an instant user interface and robust reporting tools to manage your application’s database.

Does anyone out there have additional information on this licensing model? If so, what capabilities are included? Suppose this license type was added to the Salesforce.com’s edition comparison chart, how would it look?