Winter is coming! But don’t fret – there are plenty of fireworks in the Salesforce Winter ’14 Release Notes to keep you warm. There are a significant number of functional updates that can help improve efficiency and continue growing the success of your company. After reviewing and assessing the many, many features in Winter ’14, I have come up with a list of 5 features that warrent a spotlight.
1) Sales Cloud
- Salesforce Console for Sales
- This console has a powerful integration toolkit that allows for an improved service flow. The integration toolkit will unlock more diverse functionality from the Sales process flow. It is a dashboard that lets reps quickly and efficiently identify key contacts, follow up with leads, and access sales intelligence
2) Chatter
- Mention Groups
- Chatter now makes it easier to reach out to internal specialist groups, which improves connectivity and collaboration.
- Mobile Updates
- Recent updates allow for chat on records as well as editing and updating of the record data. When installed on an iOS device, any Salesforce email will also open in the Chatter Mobile App.
3) Service Cloud
- Knowledge is free, if you want to read it
- Knowledgebase Articles are now available to read without an additional feature license. Chatter will also be included for draft articles to help collaborate content prior to publishing.
- Entitlement Versioning
- This feature lets you make changes to existing entitlement processes, even if they are assigned to activate entitlements and cases. With entitlement, you don’t need to create entirely new processes – you simply can create new versions of existing ones.
4) Salesforce for Outlook
- The new improvements to this app make it easier to add events from the side panel with the “send and add” feature on the side bar. When adding an event from the side panel, it automatically syncs the calendar event with Salesforce, so there is no need to toggle it. At last, a user can now hide the panel themselves from Outlook vs. needing to rely on it globally.
5) Reporting
- Historical Trending
- You now have the ability to store snapshots of data to report against so you can get trending information in reports. You can capture up to five dates within the last four months and clearly see current and historical values for a clear comparison.
- Embedded Analytics
- Now, you are able to add up to two report charts to your record page layouts. This feature is very easy to use, all you have to do is drag and drop a report into the page layout by using the normal page layout wizard and an “options” bar does the rest! The chart is automatically filtered by a field on the record so the report doesn’t have to be modified. This is a terrific feature with loads of value to present to your users.
I hope this was a valuable read for you. Look for my Spring ’14 post in a few months! To view the full Salesforce Release Notes Winter ’14 document click here!
