The salesforce.com Summer 11 release is due to hit an org near you in the next 30 days. Are you ready? As usual, Ive scoured through all 71 pages of the release notes and pulled out my favorite features. I didnt hit all of the items in the release notes so make sure you pull up the PDF and check out all of #superfrickinawesomeness in this release. Also remember to visit the Summer 11 Force.com Platform Release Preview page for any last minute info.
Jigsaw is GA!
- Everyone using supported Salesforce editions (Developer, Enterprise, Professional, and Unlimited ) can search for Jigsaw CRM records. The Free version of Jigsaw provides Jigsaw data to all users, but you need to implement the paid version of Jigsaw to get complete contact and lead data.
- Free version users can't see phone and email information for contacts, and they can't add contact or lead records to Salesforce.
- Jigsaw has it's own Licenses & Limits, so check the docs for more info.
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Chatter Enhancements
- Save feed search or topics as a "Chatter favorite" for easy access.
- You can now view Chatter feeds on standard and custom object list views.
- Use Global Search to find people who are mentioned in Chatter.
- When sharing a file with a person or a group, you can choose to give them viewer or collaborator permissions.
- Enhanced filters to help you find and view specific groups of files more quickly and easily on the files tab and "select from salesforce" search.
- A new Chatter Mobile App for Android (beta) and updates to Chatter Mobile apps for BlackBerry and iOS devices
- Organizations with login IP restrictions can now allow specific users and groups to use the Chatter mobile app outside of the login IP range.
- Chatter will automatically recommend people in your organization that you might want to follow based on similar interests.
- Each new org that enables Chatter will have a special user named "Chatty" that offers tips, tricks, and sample postings to help users get started with the default Chatter groups. Uh.... does this sound like Clippy?
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Sales & Service Cloud Enhancements
- Salesforce CRM Content Workspaces are now called "Libraries".
- Chatter files are now included in Salesforce CRM Content Searches
- Granular permissions for Salesforce Knowledge including "create", "read", "edit" and "delete" object permissions for article types.
- Workflow rules and approval processes are now available for Salesforce Knowledge article types.
- Custom console components allow you to customize, extend, or integrate the sidebars of the Service Cloud console using Visualforce.
- You are now able to customize the page layout for milestones.</ul>
Analytics
- Some operations with the Report Builder load asynchronously, so you can continue to make changes to your report while the preview loads. Asynchronous loading isn't available for matrix reports.
- In Report Builder, you can now select multiple fields at once to add, remove, or reorder.
- In addition to posting snapshots to dashboard and user feeds, you can now post snapshots them to Chatter group feeds! A snapshot is a static image of a dashboard component at a specific point in time.
- No more "lost" dynamic dashboards! You can no longer save dynamic dashboards to a personal folder. </ul>
Security Enhancements
- The identity confirmation process has been improved and made consistent across devices. Salesforce now sends a numeric verification code to users instead of a URL for identity confirmation.
- Just-In-Time Provisioning with SSO uses SAML to create users on the fly the first time they try to log in with SSO.</ul>
Chatter Connect RESTful API
- The new REST API makes it much easier to fetch chatter data!! No more need to traverse the byzantine Chatter data model. Relationships between objects can easily be traversed without having to resolve foreign keys!
- The API provides access to Chatter feeds and social data such as users, groups, followers, and files.
- Returned information is automatically localized to the user's time zone and language and feed items are structured in a way that makes it easy to render.
- Uses OAuth2 and a Salesforce remote access application</ul>
Force.com Enhancements
- The sidebar in Setup includes a search box for browsing and quickly finding setup tools (not records), a la the Greasemonkey Setup Enhancer. Finally!
- The Global Search box now appears in the header of all Salesforce setup pages.
- A new enhanced profile user interface to easily navigate, search, and modify settings for a profile.
- Deferring Sharing Calculations allows you to suspend automatic group membership and sharing rule calculation until your system has the bandwidth and processing power.
- A new System.URL Class which seems to be the favorite new feature for most developers. You can use the methods of the System.URL class to create links to objects in your organization. Objects can be images, logos, or records that you want to include in external emails, in activities, or in Chatter posts.
- New limit for @Future method invocations. Per the release notes, "The basis for the computation of the limit on the number of future method invocations changed. In addition to full Salesforce user licenses, Salesforce Platform user licenses are now included in the computation of the limit and Chatter Only, Guest User, Customer Portal User, and Partner Portal User licenses are excluded. The limit is 200 method calls per full Salesforce user license and Salesforce Platform user license, per 24 hours. This is an organization-wide limit. For example, suppose your organization has three full Salesforce licenses, two Salesforce Platform licenses, and 100 Customer Portal User licenses. Your entire organization is limited to only 1,000 method calls every 24 hours ((3+2) * 200, not 105.)".
- Dependent lookups are now GA.
- The limit for the maximum number of fields on a custom object has been raised from 500 to 800 fields per object in Unlimited Edition.
- The total number of sharing rules per object increases from 100 to 300 in Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Developer and Database.com Editions.
- There are no longer limits to the number of rich text area and long text area fields that an object can contain, although your Edition's limit (all editions except Database.com) for the total number of custom fields allowed on an object, regardless of field type, still applies. Now, each object can contain a total of 1.6 million characters across long text area and rich text area fields. The default character limit for long text area and rich text area fields is 32,000 characters. A long text area or rich text area field needs to contain at least 256 characters.</ul>
Visualforce Enhancements
- Javascript Remoting for Apex Controllers is now GA
- Visualforce now allows some methods in Apex controllers to be called via Javascript using the @RemoteAction annotation.
- Inline editing on Visualforce pages now supports rich text area fields bound to the
Dynamic Visualforce Components - Pilot
Dynamic Visualforce components offer a way to create Visualforce pages that render according to a variety of states, such as a user's permissions or actions. Rather than using standard markup, dynamic Visualforce components are designed in Apex.Enhanced Field Sets Editor - Beta
With the Enhanced Field Sets Editor you can now create field sets with a drag and drop WYSIWYG interface. The enhanced editor lets you quickly customize, create or edit field sets for your organization, or edit any installed field set with an improved drag and drop design.Mobile Phone Verification Pilot
As part of the pilot, if you get an identity challenge when logging into Salesforce, you are sent an email message with a security code. You must enter that code to confirm your identity.
