Spring 08 really? But it is snowing…
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Spring 08 really? But it is snowing…

Posted by pierre on Tue, 02/12/2008 - 20:24

I know, I know, the release name could seem a bit off but the new features are there! This realease is packed with many enhancements but here are some I am particularly excited about:

  • Opportunity Roll-Up Summary Fields on Accounts. You can now add all (or only some) opportunities under an account and bring the total into an Account field. For example, you can add all the organizational donations and show the total on a field on Account (Organization). More info
  • Ideas. Have you ever looked on http://ideas.salesforce.com ? This allows you (the Salesforce user) to post and share your feature ideas. Others can vote/promote ideas. Some ideas become features in future Salesforce.com releases. It is a little bit like American Idol for Salesforce features. Now this functionality is available to you and you can create your own Ideas Community. An example would be to use this between board members to exchange ideas. If your organization is offering services, you could have an Ideas Community to allow your constituents to share their feedback and new ideas for your services.
  • Outer Joins reporting. You now can create a report that will include records with related records AND without. For nonprofit organizations, this means you can now create a report that will show all the contacts who donated AND contacts who did not. More info

Dashboards: dashboard is a great feature in Salesforce. It helps you to drive your organization by providing you with graphical views of some key metrics. For example, a dashboard could show a pie chart representing the gender of the children your are serving, the average attendance of your workshops, how much money has been raised against your goal. Spring 08 brings some enhancements to this already great functionality:

  • Dashboard refresh scheduling. You probably realized that unless you press the Refresh button above your dashboards the date will NOT be updated. You can now schedule dashboards to be refreshed automatically. More info
  • Email dashboard. Instead of having to log into Salesforce to view dashboards, you can now send them via email. For example, you could now schedule to send the updated donations dashboard to all your board members before a board meeting or share a program performance dashboard with funders.

For the full list of features http://blogs.salesforce.com/features/spring_08/ and https://na5.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_spring08_release_notes...

 

 

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