Here's a little formula that I came accross that comes in handy when you need to create reports and dashboards (it also works with List Views too!) that display things like Activities, Cases, Leads, Opportunities, etc that were created by one user, but might now be owned by another user. 

Unfortunately the built-in Salesforce  "My..."  and "My Team..." filters only reference the record Owner field, so you're forced to clone reports and edit the Created By filter (making the Running User pretty  much useless). Here's what you do: 
 
Create a custom field on the objects that
you  need to track CreatedBy (User).
Field Name:  CreatedBy$User
Datatype: Formula
Return Type: Number, 0  decimals
Formula: IF(CreatedById = $User.Id , 1, 0) 
 
Now just add a simple filter to your reports and now use the Running User to create Scheduled Reports and Dashboards that display anything a user  created.  Now if you need to create a new "Created By... Dashboard" all you have to do is clone the Dashboard and change the Running User (no more cloning and editing reports for each user) 

The simple filter:
Field: CreatedBy$User 
Operator:  [equals] Value: 1

If you use Salesforce in your day-to-day job, you know that it’s an extremely valuable asset to help you keep your contacts and sales process in check.

With ScanSnap and Salesforce, users have a quick and efficient way to scan and attach important sales documents to contacts, leads and other resources in Salesforce.

To see how this solution works together to keep your workflow operating efficiently, check out this video.

Salesforce recently released a statement giving release dates for their Spring ’13 edition of SFDC. The Sandbox preview window will begin January 11th, 2o13–while the regular Winter ’13 users will not get the preview until February 9th, 2013. If you would like to change your status, make sure to follow the directions here to make sure your Sandbox can take part in the January preview.

http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2012/11/spring-13-sandbox-preview-instructions.html

The release notes for Spring ’13 have not yet been released–rest assured we’ll post them when available.

Hubspot and Salesforce now have a bidirectional sync which is pretty cool! This means your Hubspot leads and contacts can automatically be updated or added into Salesforce, with no going between softwares.

 If the Salesforce integration is already installed in your Hubspot, the sync is easily activated in your Salesforce settings. Here is a brief tutorial, click to go the hubspot for details.

The next release of Salesforce is coming very soon (September 7th for some Sandbox and Dev orgs and by October 25th for full release to all Production Orgs) so here is a (fairly) quick summary of the most interesting new features and updates. This is by no means a complete list of upcoming changes and the full preview release notes can be found at here. This post will only cover updates for Chatter, Force.com and Salesforce.com, please review the release notes for changes to Database.com, Site.com, Data.com or other Salesforce properties being updated.  It should also be noted this post is based on preview release notes and the final release of Winter ’13 may not reflect the topics discussed in this post.


Salesforce.com 

Management of multiple Salesforce organizations has never been easy so with Winter ’13 Salesforce is hoping to alleviate that problem. They are introducing the Environment Hub so that organizations with many organizations can record and track their orgs in one place. Users will be able to list, tag and organize their Salesforce Instances as well as search the list of orgs or see the relationships between different organizations.

Salesforce has also included additional chatter features such as polls, interface customization, an updated chatter desktop and media previews. Outlook and Salesforce integration has also had a major improvement. Now Salesforce information can be see directly in Outlook in the Salesforce Side Panel and more data is available for syncing back to Salesforce from Outlook.

A pilot program in the upcoming release is Salesforce Communities. Salesforce Communities bring enhanced collaboration features to Salesforce. These communities allow organizations to create groups made of internal users or to include external users such as customers with control over what is shared to the community. The communities can be branded to match the companies creating the communities. 

Salesforce and Force.com Development Changes

Salesforce has introduced a new field type for the Winter ’13 release called geolocation. Geolocation fields store the latitude and longitude of a location in Degrees, Minutes, Seconds or Decimal notation. A geolocation field also use up three custom fields (latitude, longitude and internal use) from the orgs governor limits when created and is called in apex as each of the three separate fields. Salesforce does not provide a geocoding service to translate addresses to latitude and longitude for this new field type.

Additional security features are being introduced with Winter ’13 such as organization wide permission sets (rather than user license based) and manual sharing on user records. Also included are clickjacking protect, OAuth and SAML improvements.

Polymorphic SOQL queries have been introduced for polymorphic relationship fields. If a relationship field could be for more than one object type than a SOQL query can now be written to select different fields based on the object type of the relationship field. See the documentation for specific examples.

Apex code has also seen a couple of changes one of which is that map keys and sets can now be non-primitive data types. They can now be user defined class types, sObjects, other collection types as well as standard Apex classes.  Webservice and HTTP request callouts can now be tested natively in unit tests  and importing test data for unit tests has been made easier.

Developers can now define default values for sObject creation or upload test data in static resources and call that data in their tests. Developers now have the option of avoiding of the hassle of defining new custom data for every single unit test. This hardly all of the development changes to Salesforce for this release so please review the release notes to see the other changes in detail.

Canvas Framework

A new development in Winter ’13 as a pilot is the Canvas Framework. This addition has its own user guide. The Canvas Framework brings a whole new component to integrations between external systems and Salesforce.

With Canvas Framework developers will now be able to implement external web apps directly into Salesforce orgs themselves. The web apps will be framed into the org in a 800 x 900 pixel frame. These web apps can take advantage of OAuth or signed requests to authenticate the app from Salesforce. Canvas apps can also call back to the Salesforce org they current running into to get some context
information about the org.

If we got a little too techy for you, no worries, this is what we here at Incarni Partners love to do! Feel free to contact us to help you take advantage of all the NEW cool Salesforce features!

If you are using Google Apps for your business, then Cirrus Insight is a Salesforce tool is something to look into for your business or non-profit. Cirrus Insight works with Gmail and Salesforce to integrate your data. It shows you the details you need to know about your leads and your contacts, within your Gmail account. 

Whether you’re in marketing, sales, service, or support, valuable information flows in and out of Gmail with no connection to the history and intelligence available within Salesforce.com.

Cirrus Insight makes the connection by allowing Salesforce users to keep track of and manage customer information directly from Gmail.

Cirrus automatically pulls CRM intelligence into your Gmail inbox whenever you open an email. You can see contact information, activities, opportunities, and cases all with direct links for more detail.

The most important next steps such as creating leads (a common sales rep headache), creating activities, opportunities, and cases, and logging emails, are fast and convenient in Gmail.

As a result, Cirrus Insight increases the value of your Salesforce CRM asset while improving sales and service rep effectiveness and compliance.

Real-time Salesforce Information in Gmail
* See contact information
* See Email, Call, and Meeting history
* See Related Opportunities and Cases

Manage Leads and Contacts in Gmail

* Log emails from Gmail
* Relate emails to specific Cases and Opportunities
* Create reminders and schedule events
* Create new Opportunities and Cases
* Create new Leads and Contacts from emails
* Link New Contacts to Existing Accounts, or Create a New Account

* Create Opportunities or Cases when customers inform you of new deals or issues

Salesforce Editions:
Unlimited, Enterprise, Professional, Group, and Dev.

Many of us are looking at the adoption of cloud as just another technology, and
are leaving the decisions on how to adopt, own, and manage the cloud up to
engineers. But acquiring a cloud management platform is not an engineering
decision — it’s a strategic one. Read on.....

http://gigaom.com/cloud/cloud-is-a-corporate-strategy-not-a-tactical-solution/