It only seems like a month or two ago that I was extolling the virtues of the analytics features in the Winter'09 release. But here we are again, and it's that time again.

This weekend, Sandbox rolled out with the new features, and pre-release has been available for a while - looking at the end of the status page, you can see the release-related maintenance windows.

We'll go in order of the easiest to understand to the hardest:

Dashboard Finder

Do you have troubling finding your dashboards? Have too many? Without trying to sound like an infomercial about how opening jars will get you to prison, I know I do.

There's no idea for this one to show how popular it is, but we've seen when watching users use salesforce.com that people can't find one named dashboard in the long list that's on the

Turning it off and on

If you want to turn it off and on, that's in the setup | customize | User Interface page. It's on by default. In testing, 9/10 admins said their cats preferred it. Or was that some catfood? But when doing the usability tests, most users though that it should be on by default,  they wouldn't turn it off, and that users used to the old way of doing things would not get confused.

Using it

So, you are looking at a dashboard, and want to see another. You can click the down-button to deploy the list just like always:

But you can also type into the box, and it will search as you go. For a better picture of this working, you can look at the new release demo for the Dashboard Finder

Summary Snapshots

Summary snapshots was an idea on IdeaExchange created just after we released Analytic Snapshots. Really, it was part of the snapshot vision when we started (yes, I really do know everything but I am also very modest). In that first release, we were only able to get tabular datasets to work, but we'd already done the usability and other work to use a summary report as the source.

To use start snapshotting summary data, you select a source report that's a summary (matrix can't work for reasons I'll outline when I look at the feature in more depth), then choose which level of summary you want to map, and then schedule, and Bob is your uncle.

As with the Dashboard finder, there's a release demo for Summary Snapshots showing you the steps involved, but really, if you've used the current analytic snapshots, it will be a tiny step to using these ones.

With summary snapshots:

• So long as you insert less than 2000 rows, your report can go over many more
  • You can report over hundreds of thousands of rows, and summarize down to categories or groupings, then store data for the groupings
• you can snapshot multiple metrics at the same time
  • If your report calculates average days to close deals, as well as average deal size, and is grouped by industry, lead source, and geography, you can snapshot all of that information
• you can then use the data in the snapshot object as the source of another report

If you have a metric you are tracking in your business (like average days to close) then now's the time to use the same report you are using on the dashboard, snapshot it, and start to watch the trend as your business changes.

Accessing Previous and Parent Group Data

This is one of the hard to explain features. You'll see why it's useful in an example. Currently, in Custom Summary Formulas - the formulas you build to do calculations in summary and matrix reports - you can only get the values for the current grouping. With the new features, you can use two formulas - PREVGROUPVAL to get values from either cells above or - in matrix reports - to the left. The other function - PARENTGROUPVAL - allows you to get values from calculations in summary levels higher than the current one.

So, If you wanted to get a "this q vs last q" difference amount, you'd use PREVGROUPVAL.

If you wanted to get "this product as a % of all products", you'd use PARENTGROUPVAL.

There's also two mini-features that were necessary to deliver this one:

1. Allowing Custom Summary Formula fields to be only calculated in some contexts
   • pre-Spring'09, formulas were calculated at all levels - for instance, totaling pipeline size also gave nonsensical totals over all time - amounts of money that never existed. With Spring'09, you can now choose where the calculation should be done. 
   • Functions using PrevGroupVal and ParentGroupVal can only be valid in one context
2. A new Custom Summary Formula builder that gives you a lot more help when building the functions.

There is a video showing the new summary formulas that you can look at for a quick introduction to the features

And together, all these 4 features make up one of the 3 big features we're delivering as part of Spring'09!