Posted by: eliz_beth | January 4, 2011

Spring ’11 is in the air!!!

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?

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Posted in Release Related | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: eliz_beth | January 2, 2011

Let me introduce myself…

I’m a geek and a mom.  I’m a Star Wars fan, love Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor and I refuse to let go of either my phone (HTC EVO) or Kindle.  In May of 2009, I left the world of IT for a new position doing analysis and reporting and all sorts of things that make my geeky heart go pitter-patter without the stress of systems being down and getting calls to fix something at odd hours.

I loved my new life.  I have great managers and coworkers and the work is challenging but I get to leave it at the office.  No more laptop, no more blackberry… if I did something afterhours it was because I wanted to.

Then came February 2009 and Salesforce.com into my life.  As Neo said after being shown the Matrix-

Whoa.

I jumped headfirst into Salesforce, took the Admin 201 class and hit the ground running on my return to the office.  Over the past year I’ve cleaned up what was built before I came on, built tons of new items and learned a lot about the platform in the process.  I get in trouble at home for working on “work stuff” but it is just that much fun and I love it so!  It beats Mafia Wars, that’s for certain!

In my office I’m it when it comes to performing admin work in Salesforce.  It can get pretty lonely when you don’t have anyone else who “speaks the language” and I found myself seeking information anywhere I could.  Books, blogs, twitter, Salesforce.com sites, user groups- the first thing I realized was that while I may be solo at the office, at the tips of my fingers is a connection to the best community think tank I’ve ever experienced.  Through Twitter and the Dreamforce application, I found “my peeps” as I like to think of them.  Folks from various backgrounds who jump on a challenge, are very friendly and share a desire to help others on this Salesforce.com path.

Which brings me to why I’m here and writing this now– there are tons of great blogs already about being an admin.  However, as every instance of Salesforce is different, I believe so is every admin’s experience.  I look forward to sharing the tricks and lessons I’ve learned and the insight I’ve gained.  What I really want to do is give back to the community that has given me so much assistance and laughs in the past year as I started on this journey. 

So pull up a chair, feel free to play with the box of LEGO, and let’s see what kind of magic we can make while we work together to be a force to be reckoned with!

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Posted in Intro - About me | Tags: ,

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