Winter 09 Full Training Orgs
Sure, prerelease orgs are nice, but something’s always lacking. We have to go in and enable all the cool features, which is nice in that we learn them better, but it’s also nice to get to play in a full-featured org. Salesforce CRM (the new name) has had Exercises to teach us what to do, and I’m sure they will again this time…
Meanwhile, I stumbled upon an even better treat: Winter 09 TRAINING orgs. Yes, orgs with tons of data and all the add-ons you could ever want:
Salesforce Content
Customer Portal
Partner Portal
Advanced Currency Management
Custom Fiscal Year
Translation Workbench (and international Apex features)
Outlook Connect 3.2.501 (new version)
Cool orange highlighting of fields I’m editing in the setup area
Recruiting App
QuotePDF App
Bug Tracking
Time Card (??)
A/R Invoice
…AND all the new stuff from Winter09
Where is this? I’ll tell you:
Standard Prerelease org: https://prerelwww.pre.salesforce.com/form/trial/prerelease_winter09.jsp
Premium Training org: https://prerelwww.pre.salesforce.com/form/trial/training_winter09.jsp
Absentee Voting Forms (Necessary for Dreamforce Attendees)
I realized a while ago that Dreamforce would be on Election Day. Somehow it took a while to register (no pun intended) that I needed to fill in an absentee ballot. But where to get one?
Thankfully, there is a website devoted to absentee ballots, http://www.longdistancevoter.org/. Please go to this site and do what is necessary to fulfill your civic duty.
If you want to vote early, which is slightly different, Reed College has a super website on early voting (updated regularly) with information on each state’s policies.
And if I may, I’ll get on my soapbox now: I was born in South Africa, a country where specific groups of people were not only denied the right to vote, but were denied the right to live in certain areas and pretty much every other right that we have in this country. I became a citizen at age 12 and promised my family that I would always do whatever it took to cast a vote in every election I could. Sadly, I broke my promise when I didn’t vote in the 2004 Presidential election. Yes, Kerry carried Illinois, so in retrospect my vote didn’t “matter,” but I still feel bad about it.
Of note, in Australia, not only is it one’s civic duty to vote, but all citizens are REQUIRED to vote. Yes, that’s right. If they don’t vote, they have penalties!
And this year, absentee ballots are predicted by some to be more important than ever.
So please do two things:
- Vote. If you’ll be at Dreamforce, vote absentee. Even if you live in San Francisco, if you don’t want to miss a minute of Dreamforce, you can still vote absentee. You can send in your application pretty much anytime in the month of October, and ballots are due, in general, on Election Day.
- Join me at one of the Ballots and Beer (my label, not theirs) parties Tuesday night in San Francisco. I’m planning to find the one with the most non-profit customers and consultants, as I bet we’ll all be cheering for the same candidate.
See you at Dreamforce, as none of us will see each other at the polls.
Winter 09 (156) – New And Updated Documentation
More Winter 09 documentation has been released. Scott Hemmeter wrote a post listing some of the pages containing new content, but I wanted to go a bit in-depth on those and some other parts of developer.force.com.
Documentation
This should be your first stop whenever you have any questions about ANYTHING on the Platform. It has sections on Web Services API (formerly just called API, to distinguish it from Metadata API), Metadata API, Apex, Visualforce, AJAX, Office Toolkit, Force.com Migration Tool, IDE, and the Library.
Core Resources
In addition to a super Documentation page, force.com has a new section which contains, well, resources sectioned by the Platform’s service categories: Logic (Apex), User Interface (Visualforce), Database (Objects, formulas, triggers, etc.), Integration (API, REST), Services –What? We now have Services as a Service?–(Workflow), Packaging and Distribution (AppExchange), Development (Metadata), and Tools (IDE, Force.com Builder, Data Loader).
Now that we’ve seen my two favorite pages, let’s look at the content on the Documentation page:
- Web Services API – No longer in Prerelease, the 14.0 documentation is finalized for 156. Version 13.0 is still online.
- Metadata API – Also no longer in Prerelease, version 14.0 is available. Don’t worry; version 13.0 is still available!
- Visualforce – Also no longer in Prerelease. View Online or PDF.
- Question: Why “release” the prerelease version when it has things we can’t use in Summer 08 orgs? Seems premature.
Note: For those of you wondering about all the 13.0/14.0 and 154/156 references, here’s a guide:
With each release, Salesforce CRM (the new name for the application) increments two numbers.
Releases are generally three times a year, and increment the release number by TWO. Yes, we have only even numbers. So Winter 09 is 156, Winter 08 was 150, Summer 06 was 142, etc. Releases are in Winter, Spring, and Summer of each year, named according to the season in San Francisco, the site of salesforce.com’s corporate headquarters. Counting backwards, some say that the original release was 62. I have no idea why that number was chosen. Of note, salesforce.com refers to its org as 62; maybe that has something to do with it. My bet is that salesforce.com has Unlimited Edition, by the way. Just a hunch.
API versions are incremented by 1 each release. There have been some smaller releases, which is why you might find references to #.1 here and there. As you can see, Summer 08 was version 13, and Winter 09 is version 14.
This is my question: Why do we call the release Winter 09 when it is clearly coming out in 2008? I don’t have an answer to that; does anyone?
Winter 09 Main Page
This is my starting point for all things 156, though I wish the links worked. For more information on specific features, download the PDF files in the sidebar of this page.
Salesforce Application Name Change to Salesforce CRM
As you can see from these logos, with the Winter 09 release the application Salesforce is now called Salesforce CRM.
To clarify any confusion:
The company is called salesforce.com (no capitalization).
The application is called Salesforce CRM.
The platform is still force.com.
Force.com Logo - Winter 09
SFA Logo 156
Marketing Logo - Winter 09
Ideas Logo - Winter 09
Support Logo - Winter 09
