It doesn’t look or feel like spring yet but the Salesforce CRM Spring ’13 release is right around the corner. Here are the latest features that will benefit small and medium businesses (SMB):
- Chatter Tasks. When a task is created, it will now automatically show up in the record feed in addition to being listed under open activities. More importantly, you can now create tasks right in the feed (after your admin opts in to this feature). Note that the task publisher is just a beta release. This is a nice improvement to make tasks more social and to allow users to use record feeds more which in turn makes for a better collaborative experience.
- Searching in Chatter Group Feeds. If you use chatter groups for your internal groups or to collaborate with customers (refer to our post on Salesforce Chatter Customer Groups – Best Practices), then being able to search the group is a welcome feature. Searching for items in a specific group is helpful when you want to confirm if something was once discussed in the group.
- Salesforce Touch is now generally available. All your custom apps and tabs are now available (not just the Sales app). Dashboards are also available. Sadly Touch is still limited to the iPad. Hopefully Summer ’13 release will see it launched for Android tablets.
- Salesforce for Outlook. For Outlook users, you will appreciate the new side panel in Outlook. Hopefully it will minimize, if not eliminate, the need to resolve items in the “Unresolved Items” area of Salesforce (as having to to resolve emails because they don’t associate properly has been a huge inconvenience to date). It allows users to associate emails to whoever appears in the sidebar and to search for others contacts, leads, opportunities etc and add emails to them. Note: for Gmail integration, refer to Salesforce for Gmail – Cirrus Insight).
httpv://youtu.be/wbbSUmVFxSo
Perpetual West is a Salesforce Silver Cloud Alliance Partner that focuses on helping you get the most out of your Salesforce CRM investment.
