Spring'12 Release Features ? Inside Cloud

Prepared by: Fahad Akhtar, Danial Ahmed & Nageen Hussain

Force.com Enhancements and New Features

SYSTEM OVERVIEW PAGE
Force.com System overview page shows important usage data and limits of the organization.
There are four sections on System Overview page, namely:

• ? ? ?Schema
• ? ? ?API Usage
• ? ? ?Business Logic
• ? ? ?User Interface

System Overview Schema section contains details of custom object and data storage usage. A warning message is displayed when a certain usage limit is reached.

SCHEMA BUILDER ENHANCEMENTS
Schema Builder now allows user to create custom objects, create fields and relationships. The objects or fields and relationships created will be immediately added to schema.
Schema Builder relationships are now displayed in standard Crow?s Feet notation.
VISUAL WORKFLOW ENHANCEMENTS

With spring?12 cloud Flow designer is now generally available. Cloud Based Flow can now be included in Change Set, Managed and Unmanaged packages. We can also create flow using Metadata API.

SITEFORCE ENHANCEMENTS

In Spring? 12 Salesforce has incorporated Salesforce with Siteforce and now data can be retrieved from standard and custom objects of Salesforce to show on a website.
Website Publisher are also site designers, they will create dynamic Siteforce page to display customer facing data. Website contributors are responsible for site data, they change data in objects and it reflects in live site.
Siteforce data services allow user to collect data on website such as feedback. In Spring ?12 a new Siteforce Overview page has been launched. Now user can create a clone of his/her existing site.

VISUAL FORCE ENHANCEMENTS
With Spring?12 dynamic Visualforce components are generally available. Major Spring ?12 Visualforce enhancements are:

New Visualforce Components

• Chatter Answers
• Chatter new feeds
• Social Account and Contacts
• Live Agent

Performance Enhancements

• Single View State
• PDF Optimization and limits

APEX ENHANCEMENTS
Data Partitioning has been introduced in Spring? 12 released. Now when test class is saved developer will no longer have access to org data, they will have to create own data for testing as a best practice However by using SeeAllData=true, they can still access org data.

• ? ? ?Custom REST web services can now be implemented in Apex.
• ? ? ?Maximum number of schedules apex classes as been increased from 10-25.
• ? ? ?Salesforce Mobile SDK is now generally available.
• ? ? ?Enhancements for single sign on supported enhancement provider for Facebook and Janrain.
• ? ? ?Cross Object formula fields is also a new feature which allows user to update fields on multiple objects with some limitations.

FORCE.COM Messages
Force.com Messages can be configured to get alerts and warning messages. Usually the messages cover usage details.

?Data.com Enhancements and New Features

• ? ? ?Enhancement to data.com includes additional tabs to offer richer information.
• ? ? ?User can now add a contact directly under data.com account.
• ? ? ?Checks for duplicate records before creating new records.
• ? ? ?Beta field as clean status on records to sync records with Data.com

?Chatter Enhancements and New Features

The new features in Chatter are:

• ? ? ?Chatter contribution bar on profiles?showing how ?active influencer? the chatter user is.
• ? ? ?Added ability to share chatter post! Also comment or view can be added to post before sharing it.
• ? ? ?Now posts can be bookmarked on Chatter!
• ? ? ?Criteria based list view feeds can now be created.
• ? ? ?While uploading videos from Youtube.com user can give custom titles. If no title is given then by default the title that?s on youtube.com will appear.
• ? ? ?Now user can invite coworkers from 200 unique domains to use chatter.
• ? ? ?Smart Global search allows user to search the most frequently used objects. User can now even ?pin? these objects.

?Sales Cloud

• ? ? ?Social Contacts have been enhanced and are now called Social Account and Contacts.
• ? ? ?Social Networks are now incorporated in Account, Contacts and Leads. Developer can use Visualforce component to integrate social account & contact if Visualforce page is being used for these objects.? Else user can simply use settings to configure social account and contacts for out of the box pages.

Service Cloud

• ? ? ?Live agent is an addition to the Service cloud; it adds real time web chat to customer service channel. Live agent is now generally available as a Salesforce.com product.
• ? ? ?A dedicated console has been introduced that will manage chat.
• ? ? ?Live chat reports and live chat dashboard can also be created now.
• ? ? ?In chatter answers, now we can integrate cases, answers, Force.com, Portal and knowledge. Chatter Answers is a new self-service portal application. Chatter Answers allow quickly searching for answers and has chatter like look and feel instead of case deflection. It offers Crowdsourced answers, Corporate Knowledge base answers and Support agent case answers.
• ? ? ?With spring?12 Console users can now open and share links to console tabs.

Analytics

• ? ? ?Spring?12 introduce bucket fields to quickly categorize a record on a report for grouping and filtering.
• ? ? ?Cross filters create with or without filters using child records.
• ? ? ?Joined reports combine multiple views of a data in a single report.
• ? ? ?User can have up to 5 bucket fields on a report each with up to 20 buckets.
• ? ? ?There can only be 3 cross filters on a report each with up to 5 sub filters.
• ? ? ?User can filter each block independently on the other block add columns and summaries. User can have up to 5 blocks and 15 reports types on joined reports.
• ? ? ?With cross filters manager can quickly create exception reports. In Spring? 12 report filters limits have been increased to 20.

Written by: Ali Bin Zafar on March 14, 2012.

Source: http://www.theinsidecloud.com/spring12-release-features/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=spring12-release-features

devin hester devin hester shayne lamas cain velasquez dos santos waterboarding boxing news