The Official Salesforce Blog - Successforce

• Five Ways to Get Ready for Summer 07

  Jul 16, 2007

  Top Five Things to Do to Get Ready for Summer '07

  The Summer ’07 release is coming! During the first two weekends in August, your salesforce.com instance will be seamlessly upgraded—to find out exactly when you’ll get your hands on the new features, visit trust.salesforce.com for the most up-to-date schedule.

  In the meantime, it’s time to start getting ready for the new release! Here we’ve listed five steps to prepare your organization for the new features:   

  1. Educate yourself on the new features and functionality in the Summer '07 release 

  • New for this release! Sign up for a free trial of the Summer ’07 pre-release and try out all the new features before they’re added to your Salesforce instance.
  • Visit the Feature Detail pages on Successforce.com for an overview of what’s new
  • Dig into the Release Notes for more detail on new features

  2. Check out the highly anticipated Apex Code

  • Get started by reading the Release Notes
  • Join the Apex Developer Network for access to discussion boards, documentation and on-demand presentations to get up to speed

  3. Identify the must-have features for your company
  For the major features of Summer ‘07, we’d recommend that you focus on the top 3 must-have features for your company. Having focus on the most important functionality enables you to execute better.
  To identify these must have features, ask yourself:

  • What is the CRM vision for your company? Which features empower your organization to bring this vision to the next level?
  • What are the main pain points in your business process? Which features would alleviate these pain points?
  • Do you have customer-facing organizations or processes that are still not on salesforce? Use this new release as the compelling event for extending your success to the rest of the organization.

  4. Roll-out the must-have features for your company

  • Build the business case for the features
  • Pitch these features to executives
  • Develop a rollout plan for features that require administrator activation
  • Develop an adoption plan and success dashboard

  5. Go to dinner – no need to do anything with Salesforce upgrades!

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• New Nonprofit Category on Idea Exchange

  Apr 10, 2007

  After speaking with numerous nonprofit users and partners of salesforce.com at the NTEN conference in Washington DC last week, it quickly became apparent that we need a way for the nonprofit voice to be heard on the IdeaExchange, the place where our salesforce.com community can share their ideas and suggest new product concepts about how to improve the salesforce.com service.  We have added a new “Nonprofit” category and are eager to hear from our nonprofit users directly as to what areas need improvement or what new product concepts/enhancements would further benefit the nonprofit community using salesforce.com.

  Salesforce.com is currently being used by over 1,700 nonprofit organizations globally to manage and track donors, members, grantees, volunteers, communications, cases and many types of data beyond constituent relationship management.  They are doing this through a license donations program that is facilitated by the Salesforce.com Foundation.  To learn more about the Salesforce.com Foundation, please go to www.salesforcefoundation.org or go here to learn about the license donations program or to apply for a license donation. 

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