by James Campbell 
Salesforce.com finished their Summer ‘14 release just a couple of weeks ago. If you haven’t had a chance to read about all the new functionality available, take a look at some of the features that we think our customers will be interested in…
Salesforce for Outlook Plug-In Enhancements
You are now able to create Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities and even custom object records directly within Outlook using the Side Panel. This neat feature makes it much easier for Users who aren’t logged into Salesforce via their browser to add those valuable records to Salesforce in just a few clicks.
Think about it! If your organisation is using ‘Salesforce for Outlook’ you should consider how you can utilise this feature to improve workflow and encourage Users to add more data to your Salesforce org.
Cleaning up Report Folders
An Administrator can now mass delete public Reports as long as they aren’t being used in Dashboards or Analytic Snapshots. We regularly see orgs with a huge number of Reports that haven’t been run in over 12 months clogging up folders and making it difficult for Users to find the right Report. Purging these old Reports will undoubtedly make it much easier for Users to find the Report they’re looking for.
How do you do it? Go to Setup > Data Management > Mass Delete Records > Mass Delete Reports. You are able to filter Reports on a variety of fields including ‘Last Run’ date ensuring that you don’t delete anything that has been run recently.
We also recommend utilising the feature that came with the Spring ‘14 release which allows Administrators to hide irrelevant Report Types. This is a great addition because Users (particularly new Users) often get confused by the large number of Report Types available. Only displaying the Report Types relevant to your organisation will make it much easier for Users to identify which Report Type they should use. It also means that you can prevent Users from reporting on specific objects if required.
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Reporting in Salesforce1
Every recent release has seen significant improvements to the Salesforce1 mobile app and this particular release has focused on enhancements to reporting. You can now click on a dashboard component to view the underlying Report within the app. Users no longer have to login via a browser to gain access to the rich data that Reports offer. Please keep in mind that Users will only see the first 100 records in the app (compared with the first 2,000 in the normal interface) and Matrix and Joined reports are not available.
Activities – Formulas & Validation Rules
You can now use date fields in validation rules and custom formulas on the Activities object. This might seem like quite a niche feature to mention however nearly every org utilises Activities in some way or another and this enhancement gives you much more control over the data being entered into this object. Here are a couple of use cases:
- Create a validation rule to prevent the backdating Activities by not allowing users to enter previous dates into the Activity Date field
- Create a custom formula field to calculate the length of time an Activity is overdue
Salesforce Console
The Salesforce Console is an area within Salesforce where Users can display all the records related to an Opportunity / Case on one page, preventing Users from having to navigate between several browser tabs. There have been many improvements to the Salesforce Console in recent releases which include enhancements to related lists, interaction logs, multi-monitor support and much more. If you haven’t seen the Console before, or it’s been a while since you last saw it in action, it’s definitely worth checking out the new features.
These are just a few of the things we thought you would find interesting. To find out more about this release, you can visit the Salesforce Summer ‘14 Release page for more information: http://www.salesforce.com/