My Favorite Salesforce.com Winter '15 features by Shivanath Devinarayanan

Out Guest Ninja for the day is MVP Shivanath Devinarayan from Force.com Unlimited. Shiva is talking about his favorite Winter 15 features. Handing it over to Shiva

My Favorite Salesforce.com Winter '15 features 

1. Duplicate alerts and blocking - One of more requested features, but yet not in full power yet due to the Beta release. It embraces the data.com side of Salesforce; you will be allowed to setup rules on how to identify duplicates and will have full control on the process. Currently available for Accounts, Leads and Contacts.  Read more:  (http://goo.gl/uPTV8b)
2. Queuable interface – Now you can have total control over how your Async jobs are processed, with the new Queuable interface that your Apex classes can implement, you can enqueue jobs that you need to process, like insert a bunch of accounts.  Read more: (http://goo.gl/E8APyN)
3. Customize Community with Community Designer – Gone are the days where you needed to be an HTML ninja or Visualforce master to have a sharp looking community-landing page. The Community designer is a point and click, drag and drop way to change your community’s branding and design to look smashing! Read More: (http://goo.gl/SLh6Kn)
4. Territory Management 2.0 – Salesforce’s Original territory management lets you segregate territories based on criteria like postal code, revenue etc. But Territory Management 2.0 takes it up a notch by introducing components like Territory Models, Territory Types & Territory Model States. You can try and preview all the possible models before you implement it to ensure maximum coverage. NOTE: You can’t have customizable forecast along with Territory Management 2.0. Read More: (http://goo.gl/HNSfFl)  
5. Territory Triggers!  - I like this one personally, now you have more control to execute logic when the territory changes or if a user is added/ removed from a territory. More easier to notify people when they have a new territory to take care of.  Read More: (http//goo.gl/XLE7vG)
6. Lookup on activities (beta) – Alright maybe this one is my favorite, Even though this feature is in Beta I still feel it’s really helpful. Now you can create a custom lookup field on activities. Right now you can just add one lookup, but hey it’s better that not being able to add any. Read more (http://goo.gl/PQGRhw)
7. Access Permission sets in Formulas – Another very useful yet missing piece of the Salesforce world till now, you can access permission sets in the formulas. This is especially useful when you have a validation rule that you need to exclude for a certain set of people with this permission set.  Read more: (http://goo.gl/yiJ1JZ)
8. Salesforce Files Connect – With this new feature, now you can bring in your external files from Sharepoint Online. It works for both on premise and cloud setups as well. Another neat point is that you can add these external files to the federated search. Read More: (http://goo.gl/hPCVyb)
9. Ask questions in the chatter feed – I can see this being useful in the Success community or if your Org uses chatter extensively to collaborate. Instead of posting it in the answers forum your knowledge forum, you can ask questions directly in chatter, and if it gets solved it can be marked as the best answer. This will help in the engagement and adoption of chatter more. Read more: (http://goo.gl/R5iMFT)
10. Specify Session time out & password policies for individual profiles – A blessing for most of the admins, now you can set specific Session Settings and password policies for individual profiles previously which applied to the entire ORG. Read more: (http://goo.gl/rLvXeq)

ONE MORE THING

Wait element in flows – Flows have been the rising star in the Salesforce world. They’ve become more powerful over the last couple of releases. This feature now adds another feather to the cap; you can now have a wait element in trigger ready flows. You now can make the flow wait some time before you continue the remaining actions, and the best part is, its conditional, you can define when the wait element needs to be activated. E.g. one day after contract is activated.  Read More: (http://goo.gl/GG5uJt)

What are your favorite features this release ?