Ideas Delivered in Salesforce Releases

The IdeaExchange is a big part of the Salesforce Success Community.  For those who don’t know what it is, this is a place where customers, partners, and even Salesforce employees can log feature requests for the Salesforce platform. These ideas are then crowd-sourced, voted on, and commented on.  But most importantly, Salesforce is seeking, acknowledging, and responding to the ways in which the community feels Salesforce should evolve as a platform.  The result is an ever growing number of ideas that are delivered with each Salesforce release. As an example, approximately 199 ideas have been delivered in just the last 3 releases.

Let’s take a look at not only the enhancements Salesforce is working on building into the IdeaExchange but also a few great ideas deployed in the latest release; Winter ‘15.

Enhancements coming from Salesforce on the IdeaExchange

• Point Thresholds and Statuses  - Salesforce built this into the voting points system.  Once an Idea hits a certain point threshold, the idea is sent to the Salesforce product team for review.  The nice things is that they’ve revised and made the status more descriptive and are visually showing the progression of these statuses on the idea.  All Ideas will now have a status which will look like these: 

An Idea under the threshold:

An Idea above the threshold:

• Link to the Release Notes - For all Ideas that have been delivered in a release, they will be linked to the release notes. For the latest release you can find these in the IdeaExchange under the ‘Just Delivered’ menu option.
• Fewer Idea Categories - This sounds like it’s still a work in progress, but, they are working on reducing the amount of categories you select when entering a new idea.  These will be more consistent with, say, a case you may enter. 
• Idea Innovator Badges - Salesforce wants to recognize the great ideas the community creates.  It’s a work in progress but eventually they are going to give this badge to anyone who has created a badge that has been delivered in a release. I imagine this will grow in the future to provide additional accolades to these people.

Ideas Delivered in Winter ‘15

With 69 Ideas delivered just in the Winter ‘15 release, there’s no way I can go through all of them so here’s a few worth mentioning:

• Time Based Setting to Two-Factor Authentication - From our very own Jason Atwood at Arkus.  For those using Two-Factor Authentication you can now create Login Flows to set more flexible settings around how and when users need to use it.
• Restrict Visibility of Chatter by Profile - You can now set who can or can’t use chatter based on profiles. 
• Ability to filter out certain attachments with Salesforce for Outlook - For all those using Salesforce for Outlook, you can now select the email attachments you want to include with the email to add to Salesforce. This is a setting in the Outlook configuration and are selection you can make from the side panel.
• Make Permission Sets Available to Delegated Admins - Admins can now select which permission sets a delegated Administrator can assign.
• Forecast on Custom Fields - Sales teams can now forecast on custom opportunity currency fields instead of just the standard Amount and Quantity options. 
• Allow Tracking of API Usage Per User - You can now use the SOAP API and REST API resources to retrieve event log files that contain information on organizational usage trends and user behavior; this includes who is using the API usage within the 24 hour period. It also includes the ability to track users behavior with reports; how many they create, export, etc..

The IdeaExchange is not a vast but ignored ‘wish list’ depository as it is for some product companies, it’s a success community feature Salesforce takes very seriously, and, continue to improve upon on a regular basis. Have a great idea on new or enhancing features for Salesforce? Do you want to get an Idea Innovator Badge? I highly recommend you add your ideas to the IdeaExchange.

Do you have other favorite ideas delivered in the last release I didn’t mention? Please feel free to comment below, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @LeiferAshley or in the Success Community.