Salesforce Winter ’14 Shows a Clear Path of Success for Chatter

• Access Chatter Mobile from Email Notifications – Personally I am very excited about this feature.  I am on my iPhone more than my laptop but when I get email notifications I have a tendency to wait until I get in front of a laptop to click the link.  Now, while on your mobile device and you receive an email notification and the link will send you to the Chatter app.
• Post Records from the Group – From a Chatter Group a user, with publishing privileges, will be able to post records.  It use to be that all records could only be created from the objects while Chatter was posting those updates in the Chatter feed.  This is not only a big user experience improvement but I feel this is monumental in getting users to naturally adopting Chatter and using it for day-to-day functions.
• @ Mentions for Groups – Oftentimes, we struggle with posting an update in the appropriate group or we sometimes post the same update multiple times in separate groups to ensure the message is delivered.  In Winter ’14 users are able to mention group names in their status which will attach the post to a group feed.  Personally, because I am on my mobile very often it is time consuming to go into the Chatter mobile app, search the various groups, open it and then post to that group.  I will really enjoy  this feature because when I open Chatter Mobile I can make my post from the main status update page.
• Improved Chatter Profiles –  Oftentimes, Chatter profiles get updated upon registration and never get seen again – frankly, because there isn’t a real reason too.  Going forward, user profiles will have a lot more functionality in Winter ’14 including:
• Custom Content and Apps
• Adding and editing custom tabs and sub tabs on each user profile which will allow admins and users too add custom content within these tabs.

Pilots Are Teasing Us (Make Sure You Sign Up)

As stated on p.43 of the release notes “Actions let users do more in Chatter, like create records and log calls directly in the feed.”   With Winter ’14 comes a whole slew of publisher actions that users will be able to perform straight from Chatter.  Here are a few of our favorites (note that there are more features in the release notes beyond this list of favorites):

• Smart actions from Chatter Mobile.  Several of us at Galvin have a tendency to use multiple Salesforce mobile apps to do various actions because some work better than others.  Of all the mobile apps our favorite is Chatter Mobile but it lacks the ability to do actions.  With Winter ’14 users will be able to perform actions straight from the Chatter Mobile app.
• New Publisher Action Types – One of the most tedious tasks to do in Salesforce is record call notes.  It can oftentimes be a multiple step process.  Not anymore.  Here are two new publisher types coming with Winter ’14 as stated in the release notes:

• Log a call actions let users record the details of phone calls or other customer interactions. These call logs are saved as completed tasks.
• Custom canvas actions let users access canvas apps directly in the publisher.You can use as a custom action any canvas app that uses Publisher as a location
• Rich Text Editor – Now users will be able to bold, underline, provide bullet points and much more with the rich text editor.  Personally, I have been wanting this for several years.
• Chatter Thanks – This will be a Work.com feature that Salesforce will be bringing over to Chatter which will allow users to pass “Thank You” badges to colleagues.  This will be a real nice value add to Chatter.  I know that internally at Galvin many people use Chatter to thank each other and pass along kudos.  So we will be anxious to utilize “Chatter Thanks” going forward.