Dreamforce Session: Key Winter ’09 Feature Highlights

On September 8, we posted a listing of some of the features that were coming in the Winter ’09 release of Salesforce.com. While at Dreamforce we attended a session dedicated to highlighting these features. The following details several of the enhancements we thought could bring immediate value to users:


Scheduling and Emailing Reports:
This might be the biggest enhancement for this version. Users have been requesting the ability to have reports delivered via email for a long time. Now, a report can be scheduled to run and be delivered to a user or group of users. Within a report look for the little arrow that is part of the “Run Report” button:

When the arrow is clicked a user will be presented with two options - choose 'Schedule Future Runs...'. The user will be taken to the report scheduling screen where they can define the parameters for report delivery. Be aware that the report can be delivered based on a “Run As” user. However, when the user clicks the report in the email and goes into Salesforce, user security will be enforced.

NOTE: For reports to be delivered, the user must have access to the folder where the report resides.

Click to Create Calendar Interactions:
When viewing a weekly calendar, a user can now double click a time slot and an event schedule will pop up set to the time the user selected. This feature is not enabled by default, it must be activated by going to Setup Customize User Interface and checking the appropriate boxes. This is also true for the next feature, Drag and Drop scheduling.

Drag and Drop Scheduling on Enhanced List Views:
If you have enabled enhanced list views and Drag and Drop scheduling in your user interface preferences, you will now be able to display your weekly calendar in the Lead, Account and Contact list views. After activating the features, go to one of your Lead, Account or Contact list views and look in the bottom right corner. You will see the following link:

Click the 'Open Calendar' link to display a view of your calendar underneath the list. Then, drag records from the list to time slots on the calendar to create events associated with the records.

Campaign Influences:
Until now, users have only been able to associate one campaign with an opportunity. With the addition of the “Campaign Influences” related list, users can add multiple campaigns to one opportunity while designating a primary. You may ask,”What campaigns get linked?”. By default, all campaign responses associated with contacts of the opportunity are brought over to the new list. In the Campaign Influences settings, users can define rules for what campaigns should be automatically linked.

Case Teams:
Cases can now be assigned to “teams” of users just like accounts or opportunities. Users can set up default teams in the settings area or include team members on the fly.

Rule Based Sharing:
Until now, records had to be manually shared. Users can now set rules to share accounts so that an account is shared automatically when it satisfies a filter criteria or rule.