Some great stuff in Summer '09
Jun 30, 2009Another summer, another Salesforce.com release! June brought Summer '09 to us with all sorts of really interesting enhancements. The release notes are always very informative, but they're also long and hard for a lot of people to comprehend. Every release I like to read through the release notes and pass on any interesting tidbits to folks who don't have the time or desire to read through the whole thing.
Salesforce Sites
The biggest splash out of Summer '09 is the public release of Salesforce Sites. Sites gives you the ability to make Salesforce.com available to people who don't have a login. You can let people see data, or enter data. You could host your whole website. You can make Sites available to the public, or just people you trust.
Sites is what I like to call a "platform feature." It's put there for you to build on top of. It's a classic enabler, and you can use it to help solve your business needs. To help people get the creative juices flowing, I created a simple demo of one possible use case--putting a list of sponsors on a website. Check out the demo and see if it sparks any ideas.
To learn more about using Salesforce Sites, search for Sites in your Salesforce.com Help.
Campaign Enhancements
Another platform feature comes our way improving the flexibility of Campaigns. If you're doing outreach to people and want more power and complexity in how you interact with them, take a look at this series by John Kucera, the Product Manager for Campaigns.
The Campaign Enhancements allow you to trigger actions after people respond to your outreach, sign up for an event, or tell you they want to stay in touch. This is a feature I've wanted for a long time.
Analytics Improvements
Dashboards got a big overhaul in Summer '09. They are now prettier, easier to read, and accessible to the color blind. There are a couple new component types--the donut and the funnel. And you can now show percentages on charts rather than having to do the math in your head.
To turn on the new functionality, Click Setup➤Customize➤Reports & Dashboards➤User Interface Settings and then click Enable.
Generic From Address
Here's a small feature that is a big win--you can now set up a generic address, like info@myorg.org, and send emails with that as the From address. Now you can better control what emails you send to your constituents. To enable this feature click Setup➤Email Administration➤Organization-Wide Addresses and add an email address.
There are a ton of other features, read the release notes yourself to see them all. Hopefully you'll find these features handy--I know I'm using a whole lot of them already.
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I like the sound of Sites and Campaign Enhancements. I hope that Salesforce will shortly be able to do some of the things that we've been hoping for from a CRM!
Posted by: Eoin | July 08, 2009 at 09:10 AM
Glad you like the new features! With these platform features you now have the power to build lots of solutions to your specific CRM needs. Best of luck!
Posted by: steve.andersen | July 13, 2009 at 07:33 AM
All these features sound really great. However, I'm new to Salesforce, and the non-profit package comes with a lot of preloaded formulas that I'm having trouble navigating. I've been unable to find anyone at the help desk that can really help me. Is there a help desk number specifically for the non-profit folks who need technical assistance? Those preloaded formulas seem to keep biting at my heels and prevent me from really feeling like we can use Salesforce to its fullest abilities. Any recommendations would be great!
Thank you!
Posted by: Melissa Hamasaki | July 21, 2009 at 04:21 PM