This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 1:40 pm and is filed under salesforce.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Salesforce.com have provided a release preview and full notes for the Summer 09 release. Some interesting points to note. Our views below, please feel free to comment and discuss if we’ve missed anything:
- Chart analytics (P/E/U); developing capabilities for richer reporting. Still not an analytics engine but will make it easier for business users to get the information they need on first glance
- Recurring tasks (P/E/U); minor but useful enhancement allowing users to set up multiple tasks for regular activities
- **Automated campaigns** (P^/E/U); a major set of improvements for Marketing and Sales. Too much to mention in detail but it seems like an automated, targeted campaign management tool is within reach on the native salesforce.com platform. Especially useful for event management and sales process campaigns. Would like to hear more about email volumes and managing deliverability.
- Workflow visualiser (P/E/U); an interesting enhancement for the management of workflow, but no direct business impact
- Visualforce in dashboards and help pages (P/E/U); great to have the capability, and answers limitations for turning the homepage into a true portal for users. VisualForce does create an admin overhead, but usually worth it for the business benefit
- Generic "from" email support (P/E/U); useful for campaigns and marketing activity
- Enhanced logic for picklists (P/E/U); hidden from business users but will allow major improvements in usability of the applications and reporting on data
- Profile change tracking (E/U); major enhancement for system admin and security audits, hidden from business users
(P - Professional Edition, E - Enterprise Edition, U - Unlimited Edition)
^ Campaigns are available at an additional cost for Professional Edition
On a less positive front, there has been an update to the "Multiple Contacts to be allowed on one activity be it a task or event" idea - not good news. This is obviously a major flaw in salesforce functionality (note use of ‘flaw’ rather than ‘bug’ - it works, just not the way most of our clients want it to) and seems to be a major issue to overcome for the technical guys. We’re going to look into the options for workaround solutions but salesforce.com would do well to formalise the "tactical response" solutions to get customers through the next 12+ months.
Despite the bad news on meeting records, another release with key benefits to a wide range of business users. We’re contacting vendors of other solutions to see whether we can provide similar updates and insight. Hopefully we can provide a regular review of features and upgrades from across the CRM spectrum, not just those operating within the "cloud".
May 25th, 2009 at 9:42 am
The fact that Salesforce can’t handle multiple contacts on one activity, and they now tell us it won’t happen at least for the nearest 3 releases is making us look for alternatives to running Salesforce. Sounds like it might never be fixed. If they can’t provide that kind of basic functionality then they need to focus on business-to-consumer companies. We’re out!