Summer 10 Chatter in the cloud

Salesforce.com has done it again, coming in Summer 10, we take a exponential leap onto cloud and a brand new chatter application, openSocial web starts making sense.

With Chatter you can follow your objects, records or even users. Its just like twitter on steroids, with twitter anybody can make a tweet, in chatter its everybody in your own organization.

You can follow records, objects and applications using a simple click of a button on the chatter section of the page.

After that all the changes you follow can be seen on a single page, your dashboard.

E.g.,

You can now follow individual records and see if they have changed:

I wish to track changes on the opportunity and want to follow it through the stages, all I do is click on 'follow' of the opportunity record.

Also, I follow a certain case which was previously owned by me but now is transfered to someone else.

I can keep a track of the items I want to follow, next time I login, and the case is closed or the opportunity has advanced through a stage..

I see both of them on my dashboard. This will help the business users or even managers to keep an eye on the records they are interested. This is a good idea for the manager who wishes to be in loop while dealing with a big client. No need to ask for reports on what is happening, he has all of it on his own dashboard.

Some of the interesting features looking forward in the release:

Force.com – Chatter Platform :

Chatter gets a free upgrade this summer with integration with the custom cloud. Now you can follow custom objects, custom application, integrated applications using chatter.

Your own Domain:

Coming this summer your organization will have a unique salesforce.com URL for all your access. This will be benificial for branding of the organization. Currenlty with existing URL structure, salesforce runs on ServerURL.salesforce.com and visualforce runs on c.serverURL.salesforce.com

What we can understand from this update is all of this will run under same sub domain yourdomain.salesforce.com. Incidently on the updates page, there is no detail information on this update. So we should wait and watch whats coming.

Dependent Picklists for Pages

Finally its here, I voted for this update. The greatest of the dependent picklist are now available on Pages. No more need for multi-level picklist.

Sites Single Sign-On

Using the same login you use in Salesforce.com application (http://login.salesforce.com/) you can now access sites and other custom domain application. Single-sign on will be benificial for throwing away those memory pills you have to take to remember countless passwords and login ids. One ID and you are done.

Cookie Support

Its here, its here. Cookie support will enable developers to build complex applications that needs to store a cookie on the application.

Dependent Lookups (beta)Every salesforce user has faced the need a dependent lookup. If I have to add a account and a contact in a single page, why on earth will I need to select again from the list of contacts, I should only see those which are child of the account which is selected. This has come in Beta mode, meaning we should expect this to contain bugs and hope for update in next release. Well, something is better than nothing, I can now show the client that this can be done and make him feel at ease at least.

As I had mentioned earlier 2010 began with Apple and Google failed to cause a big dent in the Universe, I am sure Chatter will. Atleast so far it seems they will, only time will decide if chatter is here to stay, for Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service cloud have a great usability so far, cannot say the same for collaboration cloud coming this summer.

May the force be with you,

Ravan