First I'll list my conclusions, just so there's no misunderstanding. Then I'll explain some of the possible pitfalls that Chatter presents.

1. Chatter is amazing. It lets users share information in ways never seen before.
2. Chatter should be enabled in an org as an all-or-nothing switch - as it is now. Allowing it to be disabled for some users goes against its core purpose.
3. As a single-opt-in system, the risk of Chatter-Spam is huge, but responsibility falls to each user to self-police, and probably to each company to educate its users in appropriate chatting.

Let's compare Chatter, Facebook, and Twitter in terms of what is necessary for a conversation between two people to appear in my activity stream.

Facebook

Facebook is a double-double opt-in system. To see a wall post from one person to another in my stream, I must be friends with both of them, and each friendship-connection is a double opt-in, meaning that one person requests and the other approves.

Twitter

Twitter is a double-single opt-in system. To see one person's reply to another, I must be following both of them. But unless one of them decides to block me, the default is that I will see the entire exchange in my twitter feed.

Chatter

Chatter is a single-single opt-in system. This means that if I post something to anyone in the org, everyone following that person will see. Here's an example: Let's assume that every user at salesforce.com follows Marc Benioff. One user posts a photo of his son's graduation to Marc. Everyone following Marc will see it.

Sounds innocuous, right? Probably. But if a user keeps posting silly things to Marc, and enough people see it, other users could become annoyed.

Take it down a level, and imagine that everyone on a sales team follows each other. A junior AE keeps sending silly stuff to the strongest seller in the group, and all the sales people have to see it. This could clog their streams.

This is called a CLM: A Career-Limiting Move. As great power requires great responsibility, we must ask who should shoulder this responsibility.

1. The company: Training for users and a quick eye to bring inappropriate chatters into line.
2. Individuals: Just be careful. This is the Facebook public-posting dilemma. Don't forget that you have no control with whom you are connected, so anyone who wants to follow you will see anything you post, and anyone who follows someone you post to will see it as well.

The solution is NOT to turn off Chatter for certain people - Chatter is about the free-flow of data across an org, organized into forms that make it useful information. By putting information at the fingertips of every user, productivity will be increased.

Blocking people is also not a good solution.

Chatter Groups (Safe Harbor Statement!) will help, but will attenuate, not completely remove, the chances that this will happen.

Salesforce CRM should be a "sticky" app - that is, it should provide services in one place so that users see it as their central point of information. The best way to ensure the free-flow of information is to prevent blocking of certain users.

Firstly, you’ll need to contact salesforce.com to get this feature enabled.

Then be patient. It takes a minute or two for the update to propagate. Clearly, something was churning in the Force.com platform background!

Now we’ll navigate NOT to the Setup | Customize | User Interface screen (where this should be enabled). Instead, we’ll go to the Opportunity Page Layout screen.

Follow the cool prompts. They make it so easy, a … well, you know what I mean.

Step 1: Enable the Highlights Panel

Opportunity Layout Setup

Step 2: Edit the Page Layout

Choose Fields to Display

Note: You can only show fields in the Highlights Panel if they are in the page layout. (I have a feeling this has to do with Professional Edition or printable layouts, but I’m just guessing.)

Once you’ve done this for each page layout, click on the big button.

Confirmation - You are (mostly) done!

At this point, each user can enable the bar. I have no idea why the admin can’t just force this on all users – or maybe I missed something – but it seems to be an opt-in feature.

Step 3: Enable User Opt-In

Here’s the link to enable the feature. Of course, you may wish to watch a video as well!

The link to enable this setting

And here it is!

The new layout!

Return to top from the bottom of the page

It’s interesting that if you have this enabled, certain user interface settings (yes, at Setup | Customize | User Interface) cannot be changed:

When this is enabled, you cannot turn off two settings

Here’s my prediction: We will start to see two major mistakes during Salesforce demos:

1. We will continue to see the link asking if we want more information on inline editing (after more than a year, it’s time to turn that off, people).
2. At the top of the Opportunity detail page, we will see this link.

And I will continue to think less of all demonstrators who make these mistakes.

Happy Spring 2010!

Workbook
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/workbook/index.htm

Fundamentals
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/fundamentals/index.htm

Cookbook
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/cookbook/index.htm

Apex Advanced Code Example
http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_shopping_cart_example.htm
https://sites.secure.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001saDCEAY

And many more to come!

Lookup filters function similarly to validation rules when you save a record. That is, actions that cause related records to save, such as changes to a roll-up summary fields, also trigger the lookup filters on the related record and block the save.

The implications for this are massive. Let's explore two examples:

Example 1: Filter as Validation Rule from Parent Record

• We create a lookup on a Child object to Parent.
• We filter the lookup to EXCLUDE Parent.Status = 'Closed' (Parent.Status is only Open or Closed.)
• We can edit the Child records as long as the Parent Status is not Closed.
• When Parent.Status is changed to Closed, existing related Child records are not affected...
• BUT if we attempt to edit a Child when the Parent is Closed, Force.com will throw an error (which we can customize) beause that the Lookup is invalid.
• (and clearly we cannot add new Child records either)

Conclusion: Thus, Filtered Lookups act much like Validation Rules. A quick experiment shows that Filtered Lookup errors actually fire before Validation Rules.

Example 2: Filter as Validation Rule on Roll-Up Summary (from Child Record) - what the line above was referencing

• Use the above example, but change the lookup to a master-detail relationship
• Create a Roll-Up Summary field to count all child records
• Prevent saving more than 10 child records for one parent record

Here, we have triggered a filter error without touching a parent record, yet we throw an error based on a value on the parent record.

This second example is significant because we could already prevent more than 10 child records from saving, but doing so required a Roll-Up Summary field on the parent object AND a Validation Rule on the child object. Now we can replace the Validation Rule with the Lookup Filter, though we still need the Roll-Up Summary field. Whether or not this simplifies things is definitely up for debate...

Conclusion

This is a very powerful feature! Thanks to salesforce.com for rolling it out, even in beta form.

Real world example: The above example would be great for Time Sheet Entry and Time Sheet Header objects, as they would create, in effect, a validation rule on the Header record preventing editing of any child records. Awesome!

For further reading, check Salesforce Help's Lookup Filters examples.

Dashboards are improved. The colors are more vivid, there’s detail in the bars and pie chart wedges, and… pie charts can now display the actual and percentage values!

Dashboards are also new. Visualforce pages can now be included as dashboard components, and there’s a new “Color-Blind Palette on Charts” setting for each user. Here are before and after shots.

Salesforce dashboard with regular color scheme

Dashboard with color-blind/alternate color scheme

It looks like a pretty cool way to work on RESTful integrations while making some pretty pictures for your users.

For those unfamiliar with the Salesforce/Google Visualization toolkit, developer.force.com has a great introduction.

Guest profile Contact Field Level Security

If you squint a bit, you can see that the Opt-Out and Email fields are hidden to the guest user. I have no idea why these, in particular, are hidden. Likewise, I couldn’t find a pattern in which fields were shown on the custom objects I had created, nor which were visible on standard objects.

In any event, I don’t have any pearls of wisdom on this topic; this is more of an informative note to all that are using Sites (especially if you plan to do any communication-subscriptions) to check out the Field-Level Security.

For those wondering how to get to this Profile (since it is not visible in the usual Profile section), go to the Sites page > Site Name or URL > Public Access Settings (a button).

We’re all used to using inline S-Controls, dragging and dropping them into page layouts. And the entire Salesforce community has been spending tons of time recreating page layouts in Visualforce, just to edit one small piece of a page.

As an example, how would you implement the example at developer.force.com: Visualforce Dynamic Edit Page? You would do it the way it was explained in the blog post!

Well the rules of the game have changed.

As long as you use a Standard Controller, you can now place Visualforce pages IN regular page layouts!

Inline Visualforce Page Layout screenshot

The article was written by Sati Hillyear, who is also an expert on the License Manager Application. Check it out!

[Addendum 5-9-2009: For another example of this, see Jeff Douglas' blog post.]

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

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.
• Apex – Same story: Version 14.0 is ready, but I can’t find 13.0 online. I guess it doesn’t matter much, except to those of us coding in 154 orgs who might use 156 features.
• AJAX – This one is available in 14.0 and 13.0 flavors.

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.

We’d like to see triggered, bidirectional updates between SFDC Calendar and GCal, and between SFDC Contacts and GContacts. Perhaps this will make it a reality, removing the need to use a third-party hybrid application to keep data synchronized.

On a related note, thank you to Salesforcewatch.com‘s Mark Mangano for his mention of my scoop when tweeting about the Force.com Toolkit for Data APIs the day before it was made official.

Thanks, JonP!

AppExchange Logo and Apps menu with “Add Apps…” at the bottom of the menu

NEW:




force.com Apps Logo and Apps menu with

• a space
• Add AppExchange Apps
• Create New Apps

The last item, Create New Apps, takes you to developer.force.com.

Salesforce is clearly pushing the Platform, encouraging people to create their own apps. Looks like I’m going to spend the next few days going through every tutorial I can find, starting with how to code in Java. I’m heading to Sydney, Australia on Friday, so I’ll have plenty of reading to do on the plane. Problem is this: 4 hours of batteries on a 12 hour flight doesn’t really help much, does it? Oh well.