Once again it’s time for a new salesforce.com release: Summer ’12. It has already been rolled out to sandbox, discussed in several webinars and presentations, but for all of you who haven’t seen those yet, below is a summary of the most exciting features.

Chatter Messenger

The buzzwords “going social” are everywhere in our industry, so Salesforce has launched new features that “heat up the Social Enterprise.” One of those is Chatter Messenger, a native Salesforce chat, which allows you to communicate instantaneously with your co-workers. Will it eventually replace other chat forms and become the "Facebook of the Enterprise"? Time will tell. So far, employees seem to be very attached to their gchat, Skype chat and other internal chat programs. However, it will allow you to have “everything in one” and avoids switching back and forth between several windows/tabs. There is only one caveat to mention: Chatter Messenger will automatically be enabled for all Chatter enabled orgs. For companies with security concerns and companies that operate in regulated industries that require that all electronic communication be archived, this could cause a problem and disabling should be considered.

Salesforce Touch

At Dreamforce 2011 another “wow” was Salesforce Touch. This feature is now in its beta version, which explains some of the existing limitations: it is a read-only version (I haven’t tried it out myself yet—anyone want to give me an iPad to do so?). Nevertheless, it is an exciting new addition to salesforce.com, and will surely be a big help for mobile workforces in the future to enter information into Salesforce in real time and streamline their process—so keep an eye on it!

Relate multiple contacts to an activity

Another feature, long requested by clients and end-users on the IdeaExchange has finally been added: relating multiple contacts to an activity record. This will allow you to create a single task with multiple secondary contacts associated. Thus, if you have a conference call with several users, you can associate all of them with the same record, instead of creating multiple tasks for the same call. The contacts will see the task under their Open Activities and Activity History related list. One heads-up: Outlook does not support multiple contacts related to one task, so when synchronizing tasks between Salesforce and Outlook, be aware that you will lose some data in Outlook.

Administrators can log in as any user

The last feature I’d like to mention is that administrators now can log in as any user without requiring user permissions. This will definitely alleviate the work of administrators helping less technical savvy users, or when users are not available to grant access due to sickness, meetings, etc. This is a great way to start troubleshooting as quickly as possible. If you are interested in this feature for your org, open a ticket and ask Salesforce to enable it.

Above are four features out of more than 200 listed features—a very small glimpse into the Summer ’12 release, but in my opinion a very exciting one. If you are interested in the many more enhancements to analytics, data.com, and other features, check out the release notes or  preview videos. What do you think—which are your favorite Summer ’12 features?