Salesforce generates 3 releases every year, named – Winter, Spring, and Summer. The latest this year, is the much awaited Winter ‘14. The transition from Summer 13 to Winter 14, is brought about by the addition of features suggested by interested users, suggested through the IdeaExchange.
The gamut of new features in Winter ‘14 cannot be explained in one post. But we’ll tackle the main ones, divided under General Enhancement, Chatter, and Mobile.
General Enhancement
Introducing Performance Edition
Performance Edition is a new Salesforce Edition, released with Winter ‘14. It will merge the globe’s top CRM apps as well as platform — Sales Cloud, Service Cloud & Salesforce Platform – with all the extra capabilities in the Unlimited Edition. It also includes Work.com, Data.com, Live Agent, Salesforce Identity, Knowledge Base, and Additional Sandbox Functionality. It is priced at $300 a user, per month. While the Unlimited Edition is no longer available for purchase, existing users can choose either to upgrade to the Performance Edition, or just continue using the same.
More Search Options in Enhanced Lookups
Enhanced Lookup provides a new option for searching records by using all fields other than Name fields. This means, searching for a record is possible by using any value in the record such as dimna@salesforce.com (contact’s email address), Kottayam (District) etc.
Chatter
Chatter is a corporate network that lets the users work together, talk to each other, and share information, all in real time. Winter 14 provides a new facility to archive the chatter.
Archiving is very useful in situations when a Group has little or nil feed activity – yet, contains important information that must be stored. As an example, a group set up to plan for a company event could be archived when the event is over, so that the vendor details and plans can be saved.
Chatter groups have archiving enabled as default. Archiving happens automatically in case of no new comments or feed posts for 90 days. At the same time a group can be archived at any time if so desired.
New Chatter Profile Page with Profile Tabs
Subtab apps are the many sets of tabs that are available on the users’ profile pages. All user information is now set up in these default tabs.
- Feed tab — Shows your Chatter feed.
- Overview tab — Displays information related to you, including your groups, recent topics, followers, your About Me section, as well as also community activities.
Topics
Topics aid in organizing posts and observing what people are discussing. Winter ’14 has automatically enabled the Feed Tracking feature for all Topics. The tracked feed alters only for topics on the profile of the one who has created the change, but the topic page remains the same. Also, if feed tracking for topics is disabled, users can no longer follow new topics. But, the topics followed at the time feed tracking was switched on will continue to remain followed.
Topics with the Same Name Merged
All topics that have the same name, but differ only in terms of spaces and capitals are automatically merged. This can create confusion in cases like San Francisco, sanfrancisco, and SanFrancisco. Therefore, when users begin typing in a topic that differs in the same way from a current one, only the existing topic can be chosen.
Chatter Thanks
Chatter Thanks helps in appreciating coworkers. For this, a post can be made special by choosing from the twelve badges. Thanking colleagues is now possible in just a few clicks.
Mobile
Chatter Mobile
The most up to date version of important records, files, conversations, and dashboards can be viewed through the Chatter mobile. iPhone and iPad users can now launch Chatter Mobile directly from their inbox when opening Salesforce emails.
Chatter for iPhone and iPad v4.1 includes a new user interface so that you can navigate faster. The new enhancements to the Chatter mobile app including global search, feed sort, bookmarks etc. have empowered the mobile Salesforce user than ever before.
- The global search offered by Chatter looks for a wide variety of record types. This includes products, documents, files, custom objects, people, and groups. The feature keeps track of all the objects used, as well as how regularly they are used, to display search results appropriately. Naturally, objects used most frequently show up at the top.
- You can sort your feed by ‘Post Date’ to sort most recent posts, or ‘Most Recent Activity’ to sort by posts with the most recent comments, including polls with new comments.
- Bookmarking of a post lets you keep track of posts you’re interested in.
Compact Layout
Compact layouts are utilized in Chatter Mobile to showcase a record’s important fields at one look. Compact layouts are utilized for observing records on all touchscreen mobiles. Here, space is minimal, and being able to instantly recognize records is vital. Compact layouts decide which fields are seen in a Chatter feed item that is the result of a record create action. Except for text area, rich text area, long text area, and multi-select picklist, compact layouts support all other field types.
Top 12 Features of Winter14
- Introduction of Performance Edition.
- Rich search option in Enhanced Look up.
- Archiving of chatter group, for reuse and retain information.
- More organized profile page by using Subtabs.
- Appreciate the coworkers, by giving any 12 Badge.
- Compact Layout in Mobile for viewing key fields at a glance.
- Can add up to 2 Reports to the Record Page Layout.
- Sandbox storage is increased from 10MB to 200MB.
- New Limit of 30 Steps per Approval Process.
- Approval Comment Merge Fields are Available in All Approvals-Related Email Alerts.
- Two-Factor Authentication for the Security.
- HTML5 Development with Visualforce.