A Force to Reckon With

Tonight is my favorite night of 2011 so far!  I received my email notification with the details on when to expect Spring ’11 to be available in our Salesforce.com instance- for the record it’s February 4th 8 PM PST through 2AM PST February 5th.  There are many things coming – while I have not seen or heard of release notes being available, we can get a good idea of what’s coming from this link to the Ideas site.

Here are a couple of highlights that I am looking forward to:

• Google Chrome support – my company is not supporting it officially but I’m all for anything that makes work speedier at home!
• Criteria based sharing – as we grow and add more groups to our instance, it’s getting complicated.  I look forward to simplifying areas using this feature!
• The “Like” button for chatter.  I’m meh on the term “like” but if we can’t have awesome, I’ll take like.  I’m hoping we get at least two bits of additional functionality here- first that the likes are reportable and it can enable the “liker” to follow the conversation as it develops.  Many times I’ve seen something on chatter that I didn’t want to disturb the conversation with a placeholder comment of some sort so I could be sure to follow the conversation going forward.
• Another chatter-related feature- notification in the application you’ve received a reply without checking your posts or email.  I hope it is in Chatter desktop as well!
• In-line editing in Visualforce.  I’ve not built pages yet, but look forward to having this available when I do!
• Dynamic Dashboards coming to EE!!!  When I first heard about this feature I was “YES!” because it would save me from having to do a LOT of work.  Then I found out that it was only for UE and limited to 3 dashboards.  Spring ’11 brings it to EE and a limit of 5.  While this does not resolve all my problems it is a step in the right direction.  Until they increase the limit or make it unlimited, I’ll still be looking into alternative options for reporting that claim to provide this as well.  I like to work smarter, not harder.  Grinding out clones of reports with just a filter change to put into cloned dashboards just makes no sense.  It makes more sense to encourage us to build one dashboard with one set of reports instead of a set for every user to provide the individual the data they need.  Next component of this same idea is to be able to set a universal account filter for a dashboard.  The dashboard would be used for owners to show to their customers a snapshot of their information, then can use the same dashboard to show another customer the same basic set of information but pertaining to their own account(s).

Those are a few of the items I’m looking forward to taking advantage of when they come online and why.  What are you looking forward to in Spring ’11?