Salesforce.com Winter '13 Live Look
Now that the Saleforce.com Winter ‘13 release has been out for more then a week for every org lets take a look at some great features we are all enjoying while also talking a little about the shakiness of this release.
Favorite Features
There is no denying that Winter ‘13 is a feature packed release, even including some true to the core features such as Sales Teams updates and enhancements to analytics such as exporting joined reports and including joined reports in dashboards. These are truly core enhancements to the application and go a long way in building confidence that Salesforce.com remains focused on delivering enhancements to existing features as opposed to just adding new features.
One feature that is near and dear to everyone at Arkus’ hearts is Org-Wide Permission Sets or Global Permission Sets (depending on who you talk to they are called different things). These special Permission Sets are not assigned directly to a specific license type, rather they are not assigned to any license type. This helps prevent the proliferation of duplicative Permissions Sets called “Edit Accounts” for example. Prior to Winter ‘13 if you wanted to create a Permission Set for editing Accounts you would need to create two different ones to assign to Salesforce licensed users vs. Force.com licensed users. Less proliferation = easier administration (I may have to trademark that).
Chatter Polls have been a fun feature to play with. Note the word “fun”. So far this is as much as I can say about the feature because that’s what we’ve done with it - use it for fun items. In time, just like with Chatter itself, we will find a really useful way to utilize polls in our org whether it be on Opportunities or Projects.
The creme de la creme of all features in Winter ‘13 has been the enhancement to Many Who. Finally Many Who exists for Events which takes this feature to a whole other level. For those uninitiated, this is the feature that allows users to relate an Event to many invitees, not just as invitees but as an actual related Activity to their record. As an organization who uses the Salesforce calendar as our gold copy calendar this feature is an absolute dream come true.
Trouble in Winter Wonderland
There have been quite a few issues that I’ve noticed with this release which is very uncharacteristic of Salesforce.com. Usually their releases are very seamless but I’ve noticed more than a few glitches in this release. Luckily for us Salesforce.com has started to more heavily publicize their and properly tag issues on their Known Issues Site. Arkus alone has entered Cases that have led to two Known Issues which stemmed directly from the Winter ‘13 release. As I’ve mentioned usually these releases go off without a hitch but to me Winter ‘13 has had more issues then I can ever remember with a release.
Give Me More Current Features
One of the things about the Winter ‘13 release that I rarely talk about in these blog posts are the pilot features that come out. I like to focus on the features I can touch and implement immediately but there are are so many features that are pilot or forward looking like Chatter Communities and the new Outlook edition. While I appreciate seeing these features in release notes and considered part of the release, I think they should be broken out into their own separate release called “Pilot Release” or something like that.
If you are getting deep into Winter ‘13 and have some opinions on it let us know via the comments below, via our Facebook page, or Tweet me directly @JustEdelstein.
