Get Ready for Winter'09!

It seems like we just upgraded to the Salesforce.com Summer'08 Release -- I still haven't been able to take advantage of all the features I wanted to turn-up yet. I was hoping to implement the Analytic Snapshots last month, but that got side-tracked as my team started taking a deep dive into Apex and Visualforce. We kicked out some sweet customizations / enhancements for my organizations Case management application, and migrated our old email2case application to Apex.

Don't blink ... the Winter'09 Release will be here sooner than you think (although it should be called the Fall'09 Release, in all deference to Mother Nature)! I got an alert reminder that the server pod on which my organization's Force.com instance is hosted will be updated October 10th. Yikes! That's only a few weeks away!

First thing's first ... here's the maintenance and release schedule for the Winter'09 Release: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/maintenance.html


Want to see what's coming in Winter'09? Check out this list: http://ideas.salesforce.com/popular/coming_in_winter_09

There are a lot of neat things in this one. Topping the list, my personal favorite: Scheduled emailing of reports. At my organization, we already take full advantage of the Scheduled Dashboards feature (which came out in Spring'08). With the Scheduled Dashboards feature, Administrators can configure Dashboards to automatically refresh, and mail an HTML copy of the Dashboard to a user distribution list. I turned this feature up as soon as it became available. Immediately, users asked if I could automate the same feature on some of their custom reports. With Winter'09, we can! This feature will be handy, especially for communicating with Sr. Management!

Other neat stuff that I'm looking forward to in this release:

• Storage capacity is going up
  
• Lots of new features for the Ideas app (ability to add pictures, status fields, idea moderators, de-dupe / merge tools, rich-content posts)
  
• Ability to package Visualforce pages (boo-yah!)
  
• Workflow from Case Comments (ability to update Case status when a customer adds a comment from the SSP or Web Portal -- very nice!)
  
• Give users ability to EDIT case comments (my tech team has been begging for this!)
  

Plus a whole, lot more!

Release Notes for Winter'09 Release can be found here:
https://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_winter09_release_notes.pdf