Salesforce.com Summer ’08 Release Notes
Last Updated on Wednesday, 7 May 2008 04:42 Written by Steve Tuesday, 6 May 2008 10:12
The notes are out for Summer ’08. Here are some highlights in no particular order:
Public Tagging
Public tagging enables users to view and use tags applied by other users within an organization. Any public tag that a user adds to a record can be viewed by any other user who can also access the record. As with personal tags, administrators can enable public tags on accounts, activities, assets, campaigns, cases, contacts, contracts, documents, events, leads, notes, opportunities, reports, solutions, tasks, and any custom objects (except relationship group members).While any user can add a public tag to a record, only users with the “Tag Manager” profile permission can rename or delete public tags.
Across all users, an organization is limited to:
- 1,000 unique public tags
- 50,000 instances of public tags applied to records
- 5,000,000 instances of personal and public tags applied to records
Interesting. Could really be powerful for decentralized flagging of records. Appears that you can’t report on these yet.
Enhanced Lookups
If enabled by your administrator, account, contact, user, and custom object lookups can behave as enhanced lookups. Enhanced lookups update standard lookup fields with the following functionality:
- Enhanced lookup search queries are broken into separate search terms at any split between alphabetic, numeric, and special characters. In other words, if you enter ALL4ONE in an enhanced lookup field, the resulting query searches for All and 4 and ONE. Consequently, entering ALL the 4 and ONE returns ALL4ONE. Also, searching for S& returns fields containing both S& and &S.
- Enhanced lookups allow users to sort and filter search results by any field that is available in regular search results. Users can also hide and reorganize the columns that are displayed in the results window.
- Enhanced lookups return all records that match your search criteria and allow you to page through large sets of search results.
If enabled by your administrator, both standard lookups and enhanced lookups can display a dynamic list of matching recently-used records when a lookup field is edited. This list is populated from recently used items and is restricted to objects of the appropriate type. For example, while editing an Account lookup, you can see recently used accounts with names that match the prefix you have entered. Recently used contacts do not appear in this list.
Could be really cool. A bit limiting that you can only lookup against recent items–that’s a pretty short list. Will be nice in VisualForce interfaces.
Update: Pretty nice with the autolookup. Seems that the filtering doesn’t work as I had hoped. I would love to have a lookup that would show Accounts, but only of a certain record type. No go on that.
Enhanced List Views
you can now edit single records directly from a list view by double-clicking on individual field values. If your administrator has granted you the “Mass Inline Edit from Lists” user profile permission, you can also edit up to 200 records at a time with inline editing.
There is lots more about List Views–these are clearly a big platform feature for them moving forward.
Custom Default Landing Tab
In Summer ’08, you can now specify a custom default landing tab when creating or editing an app.To do so, use the Default Landing Tab drop-down menu below the tab selection
area of the app creation wizard. The default landing tab is displayed at login and at any time a user switches between apps with the app menu. For example, the Call Center app can be configured so that the Console tab is the default landing tab.
Might be a nice feature for in context help and links–maybe more so than the current home page.
New Metadata API Objects
- Custom Page Web Link
- Home Page Components
- Home Page Layouts
- Layouts
- Validation Rule
- Workflow
Oh, My, God. Page Layouts take FOREVER to recreate by hand. If we can do this via the Metadata API it will be huge!
Cross-Object Formulas
In a previous release, we introduced cross-object formulas in validation rules, workflow rules, and other business rules.With Summer ’08, you now have the same flexibility with formula fields. These formula fields can now reference merge fields from parent records that are related via master-detail or lookup relationships. In addition, cross-object formulas can reference up to five related objects.You can also create a formula field to display fields from related objects on detail pages, list views, related lists, and reports. For example, a Discounted Amount formula on the opportunity object can use a Discount Percent field defined on the account object.
Now that I’ve said Oh, My, God once, let me say OMG! Particularly useful in Reporting and Email templates where you only get fields off one object. Huge for communications!
Update: These are indeed the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Apex changes: Developer Preview
Dynamic Apex is composed of dynamic SOQL and SOSL queries, as well as dynamic DML. Dynamic SOQL and SOSL queries provide the ability to execute SOQL or SOSL as a string at runtime, while dynamic DML provides the ability to create a record dynamically and then insert it into the database using DML. Using dynamic SOQL, SOSL, and DML, an application can be tailored precisely to the organization as well as the user’s permissions. This can be useful for applications that are installed from the AppExchange.
Apex managed sharing allows developers to use Apex to programmatically share custom objects. When you use Apex managed sharing to share a custom object, only users with the “Modify All Data” permission can add or change the sharing on the custom object’s record, and the sharing access is maintained across record owner changes.
An Apex annotation modifies the way a method is executed, similar to annotations in Java. Use the future annotation to identify methods that are executed asynchronously.When you specify future, the method executes when Salesforce has available resources.
Can’t wait to play with these features. Asynchronous Apex could solve a lot of problems as it might allow governor limits to go up for these kinds of batch jobs. We’ll see.
Double Master Details
In Summer ’08, you can now create two master-detail relationships on a single junction object to make it easier to represent a many-to-many relationship in your data model.
Will be nice for those annoying junction objects we all have to create. Will we get summary rollups in two directions??? Update: Confirmed that rollups work both directions.
Analytic Snapshots
Analytic snapshots enable users to run a tabular report and save the report results to fields on a custom object.With analytic snapshots, users with the “Manage Analytic Snapshots” permission can map fields from a source report to the fields on a target object, and schedule when to run the report to load the custom object’s fields with the report’s data. Analytic snapshots allow users to work with report data similarly to how they work with other records in Salesforce, such as:
- Creating and running custom reports from the target object
- Creating dashboards from reports that reference the target object
- Defining list views on the target object if it is included on a custom object tab
Scratches an itch I have right now for a client–benchmarking groups over time.
Ideas
With Summer ’08, Salesforce Ideas now lets administrators create multiple communities that can be made available to internal Salesforce users and portal users, or restricted to internal Salesforce users only. In addition, Salesforce Ideas now includes many of the powerful Force.com platform features you are accustomed to using on other standard and custom objects. For example, you can now do the following with Salesforce Ideas:
- Create custom fields
- Specify the layout of your custom fields
- Use validation rules
- Create workflow rules
- Define Apex triggers
I was pretty surprised they launched Ideas without custom fields. I’ve come to expect that kind of customizability with all Salesforce objects.
Salesforce to Salesforce
Publish and Subscribe to Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce to Salesforce You can now publish and subscribe to accounts and contacts using Salesforce to Salesforce. Publish Related Tasks in Salesforce to Salesforce You can now forward tasks that are related to a shared record using Salesforce to Salesforce.
This could be interesting for sharing data between groups in a coalition. I still have yet to get my head around it, but am very interested now that it includes Contacts.
Multiday Events
About time! Litterally!
Extended Mail Merge
With Extended Mail Merge, a mail merge operation cannot exceed the following limits:
- 1000 records
- The selected mail merge template(s) total size cannot be larger than 1 MB.
- For mass mail merges, the number of selected records multiplied by the combined sizes of the selected mail merge templates cannot be larger than 50 MB.
Extended Mail Merge is available by request only. Please contact salesforce.com Customer Support if you are interested in this feature.
Nice that the limits have gone up. Not so nice that you can’t effectively estimate the number of records that will be allowed. Who wants to do the math described above???
Converted Leads
Converted Lead Page Previously, if you created a link to a lead detail page and later opened the link after the lead was converted, Salesforce provided a message stating that the lead was converted. Now, applicable information about the converted lead is also provided, including the name of the account, contact, and opportunity.
This makes a lot of sense. There will also be some new reports for seeing Leads and Contacts together.
Please comment if I’ve misrepresented anything or I’ve skipped a feature you’re really excited about.
Comments
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Layouts via the metadata API — YIPPEE! That made my day. Thanks for writing this up!
Great summary Steve!
And yes, page layouts in the Meteadata API is great! I’m excited about Filtered Lookups and related list in-line editing! Hopefully this will be big usability increases for our clients.
Filtered lookups – if we can hard-code which subset that lookup field could take (such as a given record type) then perhaps Person Accounts would become more useful for the NonProfit template.
Steve,
I was interested by one line on the Cross-Object Formulas Documentation:
“even across multiple levels”. Does this mean if I have the following (chained by lookups only) A -> B -> C-> D that I can create a formula field in D that exposes fields from it’s great-grandparent A?
If so I think I’ll jump for joy!
Kyle: yes, according to what I read in the docs. Although there are limits to how many “hops” you can make in a single object’s formula fields.
Steve: I think I saw it stated that the join object will support rollups in both directions.
Thanks for the update re: No Joy for filtering Accounts by record-type.
Oh well.
[...] again go to gokubi for reviewing the Summer ‘08 Release Notes and providing some quick commentary. When I saw the blurb about Multiday Events for the calendar, I [...]
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