Salesforce Winter ’15 Release is fast approaching. Check out when your organization will receive its Winter’15 Release. Additional enhancements related to force.com, work.com and data.com can be checked out in the Winter’15 Release Notes.

Highlights of Winter ’15 Release

Sales Cloud

  • New release provides more flexibility and control in the areas of territory management, customizable forecasting and revenues.
  • Original territory management feature granted users access to accounts based on criteria such as postal code, industry, revenue, or a custom field relevant to their business. New enhanced Territory Management introduces territory types, territory models, and territory states. These components lets the user create and preview multiple territory structures and strategies.
  • Sales teams can forecast on custom currency fields on their opportunities; and are no longer limited to standard Revenue and Quantity fields.
  • Track revenue with overlay split forecasts.

Service Cloud

  • Updated UI for console enables easier access for editing and finding information.
  • Lookup component enhanced to display multiple columns (great feature).
  • Hoover over related list items to get more details.
  • Compact feed space in console view.

Mobile (Salesforce1 platform)

  • Prevent creation of duplicate records. User can set up duplicate rules in the full Salesforce site; and you can also manage whether Salesforce1 users can save records that are identified as possible duplicates.
  • Convert qualified leads to contacts and create opportunities.
  • Events are shown in a weekly view and pending approval requests are shown in one central location.
  • Ability is provided to filter Dashboard components.

Communities

  • Provides three new templates (Kokua, Koa and Napili) to create OOTB self-service communities.
  • Improvements in reports, dashboards and metrics reporting.

Salesforce for Outlook

  • Improvement in side panel features.
  • Letting users add only the attachments that matter to them to Salesforce records. In Outlook configurations, Add Email lets side panel users add emails to Salesforce records, and automatically includes email attachments.
By Benafsha Irani, Managing Partner, West Coast Consulting Group