Account no longer required on Opportunities
Salesforce.com started as a B2B selling application. So, Opportunities had to be related to an Account. You couldn’t do it any other way. Tucker MacLean of Salesforce.com just emailed me that if you go to the Opportunity page layout, you can now turn off the requirement for Account.
What does this mean? Individual gifts don’t need to be associated with an Account. We can use Contact Roles to connect them to Contacts. Organizational gifts can still be associated with Accounts, to show business donations, grants, and the like. We haven’t tested all the way out to see what the ramifications would be to ditching the Account requirement, but initial tests look good.
It also shows that now more than ever, Salesforce.com should to publish a detailed changelog with each release. Feature lists are great, but there are tons of bugs and feature changes that don’t rise to the level of a blurb on success.salesforce.com. Some of these small changes have big impacts. A changelog could be a 500 line text document that most folks wouldn’t read, but some of us would and it would help us use and implement the platform better.
Salesforce.com also patches the system between major releases–I’d love to see a changelog for those as well.
March 16th, 2007 at 5:39 am
Steve - you are absolutely right about the need for a change log. It could be just a brief listing of each item, big or small. Not only would it help us keep the changes straight as they come tumbling out of sf so quickly but the mention of what to sf is a minor feature, hardly worth mentioning, might be exactly the nice tweak or “aha!” we need for a specific client.
March 16th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Point taken - I’ll see what I can do. Sometimes, I’m as blindsided as you are. Would you be so nice as to post this on the IdeaExchange so we can all get behind it?
March 18th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
This is a great idea. It would be nice if it were organized my module too.