Bluewolf’s cloud application innovation practice, Bluewolf Beyond, comes together for every Salesforce release to determine how new features can help our clients accelerate revenue growth. The Salesforce Spring ‘13 release includes exciting advancements: expanded Touch and mobile offerings, prospect targeting with Marketing Cloud, more relevant Chatter content, and new custom development opportunities through Force.com. 

Sales Cloud

Touch now has real-time dashboards, leads, and cases enabled. Additionally, VisualForce pages and custom apps can be accessed. This greatly improves the functionality of Touch and brings it much closer to the desktop experience, opening up a big opportunity for even more useful custom mobile development. Unfortunately, Nexus equipped executives won’t be able to reap any of the benefits until Summer ‘13, Touch is still only available for the iPad.

The Outlook side panel now shows contacts, leads, activities, and opportunities attached to emails. Users can click links that launch in a Salesforce browser, without signing in, to acquire more information. Gmail users, you still have to pay for Cirrus Insight.

Channel partner forecasting: Sales operations at companies that generate or track revenue through channel partners will now have some free time on their hands. It is now possible to automatically add opportunities from a partner portal to a sales forecast.

Service Cloud

Cases now available in Touch: Field service reps can now update their managers in real time about the cases they are handling. For companies interested in maximizing the effectiveness of the field service teams, taking advantage of this new functionality is a must.

Mobile Knowledge: Customers are now able to access Salesforce Knowledge on their mobile devices. Filters, ratings, and feedback are all available, but that does not necessarily mean your content is ready to be consumed on mobile. Be sure to review a few of your most popular pieces of Knowledge by first searching for them on the mobile interface, then attempting to read the content.

Open CTI: Downloading, customizing, and maintaining 3rd party adapters to your desktop is no longer required. It is now possible to build your own browser and operating system agnostic integration that lives in the cloud.

Marketing Cloud

Stacked conversations brings a Hootsuite-like feature into the Marketing Cloud posting pallete, enabling custom views of conversations across all social channels. Comment scheduling will also be released but there is no audience data behind it, only scheduling opportunities.

Custom Audiences opens up the ability to do granular Facebook targeting by email, phone number, or facebook ID. Marketing cloud users can put another piece of their prospect database to work. 

Action Targeting allows Facebook targeting based on users’ actions. An example of this action could be, targeting everyone who watched all the Spring ‘13 release videos with ads for upcoming Salesforce training classes.

Chatter

Tasks: An innovation born out of the IdeaExchange, tasks can now be created in Chatter and are automatically associated to whatever opportunity is currently being viewed. The subject line and due date are the only available fields, watch for a possible drop in data quality of any activity reports that rely on task type. Still in BETA, this feature must be turned on in Chatter settings.

Posting to public groups: Spring ‘13 allows users to post to public groups without becoming a member and by default, subscribing to all future posts in the public group. This should mean less content you do not care about in your Chatter feed.

Preview links: Thanks to expanded Embed.ly functionality rich media previews are now available for 12 additional properties. We’re looking forward to TED.com, slideshare.net, and taking advantage of the SoundCloud integration for sharing productivity inspiring playlists. Check out the release notes for the complete list.

Platform

Force.com canvas allows any app written in any language to run inside of Salesforce and take advantage of your Salesforce data and built in collaboration features. Use this as an opportunity to integrate a legacy application (one less sign in, better data sharing) or build something completely custom in whatever language your developer resources are most comfortable using.

Standardized state and country pick lists will replace open text fields. Salesforce will scan all of your current data and suggest mapping but anyone who uses Salesforce web to lead forms, or any Salesforce integrated marketing automation tool for lead capture, should expect to spend time working through the mapping and updating forms. There is no way around the manual work, but do it for data quality and significantly easier geo-targeted list and report generation.

Global search results are now sortable by any column. Alphabetical account names? No problem. Files by date added? Done. Watch it in action.

Put the Spring ‘13 Release to Work

Free Health Check: If figuring out how to take advantage of new Salesforce features seems daunting or keeping your Salesforce investment aligned to your business is a struggle, sign up for Bluewolf’s free Salesforce Health Check.

Get Trained: Want to bring Spring ‘13 release features to life in your organization? Sign up for a Bluewolf Salesforce admin or developer training course.

More Information: To learn more about Spring ‘13 read salesforce.com’s release notes or release preview.