Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Winter 11 Release Early Shape Up

Many of us are wondering what will Salesforce release at the end of this year and in conjuncture what will be the buzz at Dreamforce10. Are we going to ride the coat tails of Salesforce's momentous year with the release of Chatter or is there a ace up Salesforce's proverbial sleeve?

Certainly there is not a lot that could top Chatter but I for one hope that they have a line up for the end of year release that is not completely eclipsed by Chatters launch. Recently made available, although not so available via the Ideaexchange's "View by Status" picklist, is the coming releases line up. To get a peek into whats coming up go to the link here: Coming in Next Release.

Predominantly the line up seems to be the new Salesforce CRM for Outlook (aka Outlook Connector) and some revisioning of Reports. There is a lot of talk going on in the Salesforce Community about the upcoming changes to the Outlook Connector because apart from the dynamic Add Email, Salesforce org administration control, and a few other nifty features it is totted to be supported on Office 2010. This is a relief to many I know.

While the speed, or lack thereof, of Office 2010 support from Salesforce seems to be coming to conclusion there does not seem to be anything new in the Google Apps offering which comes as a bit of a surprise. 

Even though my company is a slow moving turtle and a move towards the Cloud technology from an IT perspective is an almost dead cert no, I am in love with Google Apps and the initial Salesforce integration is just plain a right step in the right direction. However, the spring has seemingly run dry with no real updates from Salesforce in this area.

So what else looms on the horizon for us mere Salesforce.com user mortals? Rumor has it that the Chatter application for Mobile may be taking a slightly different approach than an extension to the existing Blackberry or iPhone Salesforce apps. You haven't heard it from me but it's going to be faster and slicker than what can be provisioned inside the current applications and standalone at that and Web facing. I probably know enough to be dangerous here but not enough to give any qualified confirmations so I will zip it before I go too far, but watch this space.

I for one hold out hope that there will be something bigger than the Outlook Connector, improvements on the Reporting engine and a few new Chatter nice to haves. I guess we will have to wait and see.

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