After reading through the release notes and mucking about with the pre-release ORG for a bit, I thought I would share the top five highlights for features and enhancements that will make the day-to-day use of Salesforce by users and administrators much better. So, without further ado…

1. ChatterTM Messenger (GE, PE, EE, UE, DE)
Remember when MSN was cool? You could ping over to the other side of the office and ask a coworker about a project, send instant notes privately to discuss a conference call, or even do the age-old “Meet you by the elevator…It’s time for a coffee” message.

Chatter Messenger gives you the ability to chat in real time with any colleague logged in to Chatter. At first I must admit I was leery of this feature. But as I thought about it more, I realized there are many opportunities to use it!

Here at Force by Design, we are now an international company with people located in three primary offices and multiple client locations at any given time. Right now, I could send a personal message through Chatter, or I could go old school with an email or phone call. But if I was looking for information regarding a client, prospect, or something that isn’t in Chatter or Salesforce, if the person is online, I could ping them and ask a question in real time! That in itself makes this one of the highlights of the summer release.

2. Relate multiple contacts to a task (all editions except Database.com)
A long-standing pitch on the IdeaExchange is being tabled into product! For some time, many users have voted up the idea of having multiple contacts on a task. Think about this: If I wanted to have a conference call, I would need to set up multiple tasks to remind myself who would be on that call by placing the names of everyone who would be on the conference call in the task’s description (actually, you either set up one task with everyone’s name in the description field, or you set multiple tasks for everyone).

With this new feature in Summer ’12, I can create one task and add secondary contacts. This way each contact I want to be on the conference call will see this recorded under their Open Activities or Activity History related list. One caveat for users of Microsoft® Outlook: If you synchronize tasks between Salesforce and Outlook and use multiple contact tasks within Salesforce, the corresponding task in Outlook will be lost. This is not due to a Salesforce error. Outlook (and IBM Lotus Notes, for that matter) does not support multiple contacts for tasks.

3. Moving reports between folders (all editions except Database.com)
This is another wonderful enhancement suggested by the community. One previous problem was that reports, once saved, were impossible to move from one folder to another. You had to save the report in another folder and then delete the original.

With Summer ’12, you can now simply drag the report from the Lists pane to the folder of your choice in the Folders pane. You will receive a green check mark or red X showing what folders you can move any report to. (You cannot move reports into dashboard folders, standard report folders, or folders installed by the AppExchange.)

4. Allowing reparenting of master-detail relationships (all editions)
Master-detail relationships are a great function, especially when you wish to roll up key metrics with roll-up summary fields. But when you wished to change the master object (or made an error and added the wrong record as the master, not that I’ve ever done that…) you either had to delete the original record and recreate it, or clone and reset the master object and then delete the original record. With Summer ’12, it is now possible to set a master-detail relationship so that reparenting is possible. You simply set the Allow Reparenting option in the master-detail relationship field definition (the default is to not allow reparenting).

5. Administrators now can log in as any user without requiring user permission (Enterprise, Unlimited and Developer editions)
I’ve saved this one for last, as it may have a huge impact on administrators and how they assist their users, especially if they receive the “I’m not seeing it” phone call. Admins have long had the ability to log in as another user if that user had granted access in their personal information. This works wonderfully for troubleshooting or moving step by step through a process with a user (where the admin can discuss EXACTLY how their page looks).

Currently with Salesforce, it can be hard at times to get some users to log in and set administrator access due to meetings, vacations, et cetera. With Summer ’12, you now have the ability to set your administrator(s) so they can log in as any user. This feature must be activated by salesforce.com, so you need to open a ticket and ask for this to be enabled.

So there you have it! Out of over 200 listed feature releases, updates, and enhancements, those are my top five for Summer ’12! Which leads me to believe it might be high time for me to find an island in the sun and relax. (Preferably with a mojito included!) But, before I go — with so many features, some of you might have different thoughts. What are your favorite release points? Share them below!

Force by Design’s East Lansing office shared Salesforce with students at Michigan State University on April 14. Our first ever Hackathon drew in around 20 attendees. For 12 hours, noon until midnight, these hackers worked tirelessly to design the best Salesforce applications they could.

Fact: When you get 20 techno-geniuses in a room, give them a platform to work with, and say “Go,” you’re going to get some pretty awesome results.

They didn’t disappoint!

Most of them hadn’t used Salesforce before, and the app turnout was excellent! It was hard to pick a winner from the collection of great ideas, but our choice for the number-one app of the day integrated Salesforce with Twilio to send automated phone call reminders for upcoming appointments made in Salesforce. Additionally, users could record custom reminder messages to send to the attendees of meetings or stakeholders in projects with upcoming deadlines.

A Roku and a $100 Apple gift card were two of the prizes given to the top participants. And two more lucky winners will soon be joining the team as summer interns. So if you’re working with the East Lansing wing of Force by Design, be on the lookout for some new faces on our staff, some of our best Hackathon innovators!

The Global Search bar is a frequently-used feature with interesting capabilities. It’s a great way to find accounts, documents, cases, opportunities, and any other records you need in the system. This should be everyone’s first stop to find information in Salesforce. But there just might be a thing or two you don’t know about this new, more powerful search feature!

At first glance, it looks like a souped-up Google Search bar that will provide a mass return in your result set, but you may not realize that the results depend on your Salesforce role. Global Search scans records in Salesforce but returns only ones you have access to according to your security permissions. If you are not finding the records you are searching for, talk to your administrator or favorite Force by Design consultant about adjusting the settings.

Global Search allows you to search every type of text field, but you have to know what you’re looking for. Typing CA into the search bar will return documents specifically with “CA” somewhere in the text. You’re bound to get a lot in your result set from California, but only if the documents use the “CA” abbreviation! The catch is that Global Search doesn’t use fuzzy logic searching, so your terms need to be exact to get the result set you are after. Nowhere in your results will Global Search have automatically linked “CA” to the word “California” in the same way Google would, and running a search for Rob is different than hitting Enter for Robert.

Keep in mind the tricks to using quotations in your searches: When searching a term like Sales Cloud without quotes around it, Global Search pulls up results with either “Sales” or “Cloud” in them. But when you attach quotations to either side of a term or phrase, your search results will show matches with the words exactly as you typed them. Bracket too many words with quotations and you won’t get much of a return!

Global Search keeps track of things you searched and clicked on before, so the feature will automatically lift results that it thinks are important to you and put them at the top of your result set. But say you’re searching for something and want the results entirely generalized. Just hit the Search All link in the lower left-hand section of your screen and the results will display without sorting according to preferences. If you’d like accounts or contacts to be at the top of the list, you can “pin” them to the top of your list on the left-hand side of the screen.

To funnel down your result set, search filters let you specify the criteria you want. Your organization likely has company-wide filters already set, but you can also decide which additional ones to use. These let you drill into the exact type of records you’re after such as bookmarks, projects, or reports. To hide them, just click Hide Filters. If your Hide Filters option is nowhere to be found, ask your administrator to switch it on for you.

Have any tips about the Global Search bar you’d like to share? Post them here!

Wrong!

When beginner administrators make this error, it’s a small mistake with big consequences. Rather than starting the new employee with a blank slate, that worker is now tied to all the records from the former employee. Which means they would be associated with a sales history they don’t actually have and the company reporting is way off the mark. Because salesforce.com, like most relational databases, works by using the record IDs, not record names, changing the username on a user record does not wipe out the data attached to it. As you are likely seeing, this compromises data integrity, which leads to big issues for any organization. During an e-discovery in a lawsuit, this could be the crucial detail that makes you lose the case. And in an audit your data could be found to be corrupt and not representative of what actually happened, be it sales, login times, or any other piece of data stored in Salesforce. This could potentially cost the organization untold amounts of money.

The solution is simple and could save you a lot of headaches later. When editing a user’s record, uncheck the Active field on the right side of the screen. Be sure to click the Save button and verify the next page, then you’re set to create a new user – without the leftover data baggage.

Salesforce.com is a relational database, which means that its components work together like dominos. Changes in one segment affect the others. For example, inaccuracies in an employee’s user record have consequences throughout the entire database.

I hope this tidbit of information helps increase your data integrity for your organization!

Is this helpful? Have you made or seen someone make this mistake before? Leave a comment below and tell us about it!

These are examples of companies without quality Knowledge Management (KM) programs. Knowledge Management is the method through which you collect your employees’ knowledge and experiences, format it, share it internally, and make it available to your customers. Knowledge Management is crucial to delivering efficient, high-quality customer service in today’s fast-paced world, where time is money. Knowledge Management will differentiate you from your competitors – for better or worse.

A successful KM program must include strong processes and strong tools. Knowledge-Centered Support (KCSSM) is the leading KM methodology and salesforce.com’s Knowledge Management system is one of only a handful of KM systems that is KCS verified by the ConsortiumTM for Service Innovation. Once you have identified Salesforce Knowledge and methodology as your solution, you need to find the right implementation partner. That is where Force by Design, a salesforce.com Service Cloud Top Gun partner, comes in.

With Force by Design, you will partner with consultants who have expertise in salesforce.com knowledge, years of service industry work experience, and who are KCS trained. We understand the challenges, rewards, and best practices of Knowledge Management and KCS. The next time you can’t get a quick, accurate answer when you need service, think about how you can guarantee YOUR customers will never be put in that position. Then think about Salesforce Knowledge, think about KCS, and think about Force by Design!

With U.S. offices in both San Francisco, California, and East Lansing, Michigan, we have two awesome Major League Baseball teams to root for: 2010 World Series Champions the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers. And the only thing more exciting for us than the start of this year’s baseball season  is our own newly designated hitter.

As a founding partner, Filkins has been a guiding hand at Force by Design since its conception. Under his watchful eye, we’ve seen an explosion of growth over the last few years. So what prompted Filkins to take the helm and steer us into a bright future full of winning streaks? His response was simple: “I believe in what we’re doing at Force by Design. I jumped at the opportunity.”

With Filkins’s guidance, Force by Design clients can expect to see even more positive changes around the corner. Big ones. Filkins’s goals include becoming a salesforce.com Gold Partner and employing over 50 people in the Michigan office by 2016. Of course, as we grow, so does our ability to provide cutting-edge solutions for our superstar clients. Just look at Filkins’s pick for the new Service Cloud Practice Director, Brett Bergles. Bergles joined us with over 25 years of experience working with everything from start-up companies to billion-dollar enterprises. He’s a true grand slam. Now Brett is here at Force by Design to take our team of salesforce.com certified Service Cloud consultants to the next level. With his experience as an Auditor for Service Capabilities & Practice (SCP) Certifications, Bergles’ understanding of SCP’s tried-and-true industry-defined best practices will certainly launch our consulting team into the postseason.

Dan Becker, a co-founder of the company, was also pumped about Filkins’s rise to the plate. He said, “At this critical stage of growth, Force by Design needs a leader who has the abilities and responsibilities of an active communicator, manager, and leader. Micaiah clearly emerged as the appropriate person to preside over Force by Design in this manner.”

But wait, there is another home run to go with this exciting announcement!

Force by Design recently went international! Following a merger with the Canadian powerhouse xLerate Consulting, another salesforce.com partner, Force by Design has become a premier salesforce.com partner in the Canadian space. This means that we have an even greater capacity to share the marvels of cloud computing with our friends up north.

If hiring a grand slam of a Practice Director and completing a huge international merger is how Filkins starts his run as CEO, you can rest assured that Force by Design is stepping up to the plate with a pretty awesome batting average.

Fortunately for us, we have a special place in Cirrus Insight’s heart as their very first partner. Bryan Coddington, Force by Design’s co-founder and current vice president of sales, said, “Cirrus allows us to bridge the gap between the best-of-breed email application in Gmail and best-of-breed CRM application in salesforce.com. With Cirrus we can now quickly view Salesforce data within Gmail as well as create new records in Salesforce. This seamless integration allows us to keep better track of our customers and close deals faster.”

You can bet that we’ll be recommending this cool new feature to any of our clients that use Gmail. It makes it quicker and easier to integrate contact data between Google and Salesforce without the drudge of cutting and pasting. After all, that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is really draining! It’s recommended to all of our Salesforce masters here at Force by Design, and we can’t wait to share it with you!

In addition to the extra sparkle that going global brings, the two consulting companies are well-suited to compliment each others’ business and knowledge. xLerate and Force by Design’s common focus on salesforce.com products allows for a seamless fit, while xLerate’s clientele of both large and small companies will further diversify Force by Design’s client base.

We couldn’t be more excited to be joining forces with a company that has built such an impressive reputation and knowledge-base in such a short time. Since its conception in May 2008, xLerate has worked with more than 100 companies and 4,000 salesforce.com users.

xLerate President Nik Panter was very happy with the merger. “Joining Force by Design was an easy decision, as they’ve built a strong reputation for being not only one of the best and brightest Salesforce partners, but also sharing the same corporate philosophies,” he said. “We are very excited to be joining Force by Design’s growing team and giving Canada a Salesforce partner they can trust.”

Micaiah Filkins, our own fearless leader and CEO, is also excited to start Force by Design’s next chapter internationally. “xLerate has proven to be one of the most knowledgeable, innovative, and well-respected salesforce.com partners in the Canadian market,” he said. “We are happy to join forces with them, giving them the backing they need to continue to deliver the highest quality of services.”

Force by Design will be participating as a Gold Sponsor at Cloudforce in beautiful San Francisco on March 15!

As this is our first time as a sponsor, we’re anxiously awaiting all of the excitement and opportunities Cloudforce will bring.

Those who don’t know us will have a chance to meet some of our staff and learn about what makes Force by Design tick. From our Service Cloud Practice Director to some of our senior analysts and even members of the marketing team, we’ll have plenty of members of the Force by Design team available to meet, answer questions, talk shop, or just chat with for a bit.

Come see what we’re all about!

We’ll be hosting live scheduled demos, free consultations, call center assessments, and to top it all off we’ll be giving away a pretty awesome prize in our raffle.

Thinking that Force by Design might be the place for you? We’re hiring! We’ll have members of the team present to talk about the positions that we have available and the skill sets that can make you a truly invaluable asset to the team.

Feeling like a rockstar?

Following the main event, Force by Design will be hosting an exclusive after-party, down the street from Cloudforce at Tres (formerly Tres Agaves). Expect lots of salesforce.com executives and some of your favorite Force by Design staff to join in on the night’s festivities.

No car? No problem. We’ll be providing limousine services to transport you from Cloudforce to Force by Design’s biggest party yet!

Limo and after-party access is by invitation only, so be sure to get comfy with some Force by Design buddies, or ask around to find an invitation to the event!

There are more exciting details to come, so stay posted for future updates!

(Haven’t registered for Cloudforce yet? Register here!)

As exciting as these times are with social collaboration currently reshaping and revolutionizing the cloud-computing landscape, it is difficult for an animated will.i.am to effectively articulate this message in a Superbowl ad farrago that includes a spandexed, Skecher-clad Kim Kardashian. That said, we encourage you to join us in expressing our enthusiasm for chatter.com and the exciting shift towards more collaborative and efficient cloud-computing practices the social-networking feature signifies.  So demonstrate your support and appreciation for salesforce.com’s incredible marketing and technology teams by voting for them in the links below, and show some Chatter love!

WSJ.com; http://fbd.bz/fLHupP

Facebook Replay; http://fbd.bz/i5K8lI

“Like” the Chatter ad on the Replay tab of the “Sports on Facebook.”  Each person can vote once per commercial between now and Wednesday, 2/9 at 9:00 pm ET. Results will be announced on Thursday, 2/10.

Hulu Ad Zone 2011; http://fbd.bz/hkVHhl (Click on Salesforce.com ads and “like” it on top right corner)

AdBlitz; http://fbd.bz/hRLiXh

Thanks for voting for Chatter!