Saasy Not Scared by Shadow: Spring ’14 Around The Corner

I’m excited to report that Saasy was not scared by her shadow and Spring will soon be upon us! Videos, release notes and more can be found on the new features site: http://www.salesforce.com/newfeatures/

You should also be aware of some key dates. There will be a live broadcast on January 22. All production instances are scheduled for release February 14 and 15. For a full list of dates check out Salesforce’s blog 10 Key Dates for the Salesforce Spring ’14 release ***Due to discovered performance issues Spring 14 dates will be changing. I’ll update when the dates are released. More information can be found here Feel free to insert your own Groundhog joke. Dates have been updated***

At last read, the release notes were 319 pages long! There may have been updates so I strongly recommend you look at the online version . There are too many great items in this release to cram into a single blog post. So here’s what I’m getting excited about.

What I’m Excited About

1. Track what version of SF for Outlook is being used by your users. This is fantastic! As an Admin with many remote users who can have difficulty keeping their plug-in up to date this is great. I did a major push last quarter to get everyone updated, but I had no way to validate they were updated. Now I will!
2. Chatter Announcements in Groups. This may be a “meh” for some people. I’m excited about this one. There are some posts you just need to “pop” out at people. The Announcement may be the perfect fit, assuming judicial use.
3. Salesforce Console Multi-Monitor Support. I love the Salesforce Console, but it can get so messy trying to cram all those panels on one Monitor. This will be a great improvement for users sitting in the console all day long.
4. Territory Management can be disabled. WHAT?! REALLY?! THIS IS AWESOME! I HATE features that cannot be disabled. Sometimes what you THINK is a good feature for your use case turns out to be… well not so good. There are many good reasons to use Territory Management. For those who’s business change or you otherwise discover Territory Management isn’t for you this is fantastic. I actually gave a whoop of excitement when I read this.
5. Floating Headers in Summary and Matrix Reports. <Insert Trumpet Sound here>. Do I need to say anything more? Floating headers! At last!
6. Export Reports without Footers. This seems like such a small thing. This is actually a huge thing for people exporting reports to use with other databases or processes. This just eliminates the annoying step of opening an csv file to just delete 5 rows.
7. Text() Function picklist supported in Approval Rules, Approval steps Rules, Workflow Rules, Auto-response rules, escalation rules, assignment rules and custom buttons and Links. I am so happy this is here. I constantly try to use the text function (because it is awesome!) and get frustrated when I can’t use it.
8. “Is frozen” now included in filter criteria for User List View. Yay! We can actually find out who our frozen users are! Maybe this is the first step to letting us freeze users via a workflow rule (hint hint vote here)
9. New User Interface for Monitoring Deployment. I am so excited for this. Right now it can be a headache to track change sets. What’s even cooler is you can now QUEUE deployments. Look I don’t have to wait around for 1 deployment to complete before I start another. YAY!
10. Independent Auto-Number Sequence Test Option. This may have driven some Admin’s crazy when users wonder why there Contract or Case numbers skipped from 100 – 300 mysteriously. This has to do with creating test data for testing Apex code. The test creates data and then deletes it. For example 100 contracts will created and deleted. To End user this may look like someone simply deleted 100 of their contracts mysteriously.
11. Mass Assign Permission Sets. Assign a permission set to multiple users or remove multiple users from a permission set
12. Salesforce1 & SalesforceA I have to mention the new mobile platform. I also love that I can access both of these through web browsers. It makes training and debuging easier. Need access someone’s mobile? No problem. Just login as them and then navigated to /one/one.app and you’re there! Or /one/admin.app  Fantastic!

Most Excited Pilot Features

1. Launch Flows from Workflow Rules  I love visual workflow. You may see a theme in this list. Right now a flow can only be launched by clicking a button, a link, or going to a Visualforce page. How cool to launch it from a Workflow rule!
2. Sobject Variable for Flows
3. Collections for Flows
4. Loops for Flows
5. Automatic Picklist values for Flows

All of these involve Visual Workflow. It’s a first step in “knocking down” the wall between declarative development and code development. You can do a lot with Visual Workflow but there are somethings that were missing. You weren’t able to have collections of records or loop through them. The pilot will fix that! Creating dynamic picklists were a pain because it based on the data in your records and not the metadata in the fields themselves. That’s going to change! I’m very excited for these features to leave pilot!

1. Salesforce Files Sync A way to download and sync my files? This could be a game changer for many people who want to use Salesforce Files but do not like the current requirement of Download -> Edit -> Upload.
2. Transfer Files during Chat (LiveAgent) This may not seem like a big deal, but in an Chat situation it can be a big benefit to be able to send a user a file without having to rely on email.

So that’s what’s I’m getting most excited about. What features are you looking forward to?  Let me know! Post in the comments.