Here are a few little tricks we did for a client. If you want to change your fields to be something more striking and graphical. You can do a few quick formulas and your get some real improvement to usability that can be eye catching!

Sample 1

Salesforce Summer ’13 is coming! The release notes were just recently disclosed, and the consulting team at Incarni Partners could not be more excited about the new features! The thing is–there are a LOT of them. These release notes are some of the largest ever, at 258 pages. We bit the bullet and went through the update for you, picking out the best bits. Here’s the quick-and-dirty about the newest edition to the SFDC family:
 
Chatter - Communities are available to all and out of beta! That means no more Customer/Partner Portal, as Communities brings an unprecedented level of interaction (no logging in!). Additionally, even more features are available through Chatter email replies–now users can Bookmark, Follow, Unfollow, Like, Unlike, etc. Perhaps the most exciting update is Chatter Actions, which allows users to create records directly in the feed. All in all, the updates to Chatter subtly further Benioff’s vision of the interface becoming the primary one for SFDC.
 
Opportunities - The new Opportunity Splits feature allows users to “split credit”–either as revenue splits or overlay splits. Revenue splits provide credit to team members who are directly responsible for revenue that an opportunity generates, while overlay provides credit to those indirectly responsible. Both increase the usability and flexibility of SFDC, as any opportunity can be split (as long as it adds to 100%).

Reports/Dashboards - With Summer 13, Reports and Dashboards can be set to Viewer, Editor, or
Manager access. It’s not revolutionary, but certainly needed to be done!

Touch - SFDC Touch has received many updates–there’s a new activity pane to show all open tasks one one screen, and a generally easier interface. Visualforce Tabs are also supported in the new Touch, allowing users to better organize their mobile interface.

Service Cloud - Last year’s Service Cloud addition, Live Chat, is further upgraded–including more advanced session reports, an “Over the Shoulder” feature for managers, and formatting features like a multi-line input box. Additionally, the Service Cloud Ideas platform is being improved in Summer 13. Just like Communities, Ideas now has a Reputation feature, giving posters incentive to interact and influence.

New Admin UI – The Admin Setup gets a facelift and is organized in a much more intuitive fashion. I could make a joke that it’s finally organized at all, but it’s nice to see it re-done a bit. Veterans will probably need to get used to it, but it’s not too different. In addition, the user settings area gets updated as well, which makes managing your user settings – like Chatter, Email, etc. – much more intuitive (See below). Finally, for the developers, the developer console has also been re-done.

Salesforce for Outlook Updates – It’s great to see the steady improvements here as well. Summer 13 adds Shared Activities which allows a user to add an email to multiple Contacts. Probably won’t be used a ton, but it’ll be very handy when needed. We also get the ability to manually sync Calendar Events, Contacts and Tasks. Great to have the flexibility there. Finally, the sidebar now has the ability to see Cases related to a Contact and also can search related Custom Object and not just the Standard objects
now.

Visualforce now supports CTI – This was an annoyance we ran into a couple of times where if you had a visualforce section that contained a phone number, the click to dial would not work for that phone. There is now a VF component that enables click to dial, solving this issue.

Do you have unanswered questions about Salesforce Summer 13? Are you not sure whether or not you want to update? Give us a call, we’re ready to listen.