As a follow-up to the post last week which listed recent updates to the Winter ’12 release notes, here are this week’s additions.

Encrypted Fields Enabled

Prior to Winter ‘12, you had to contact your salesforce.com representative to have encrypted custom fields enabled for your organization. Starting in Winter ‘12, encrypted custom fields are now automatically enabled for organizations.

Chatter REST API Enhancements – Support for Overriding HTTP Methods

If you use an HTTP library that doesn’t allow overriding or setting an arbitrary HTTP method name, you can send a POST request and provide an override to the HTTP method with the request parameter _HttpMethod.

Changes to Granting Login Access

When granting login access via Your Name > Setup > My Personal Information > Grant Login Access, you now choose the expiration date from a picklist. Allowed values are:

• 1 Day
• 3 Days
• 1 Week
• 1 Month
• 1 Year

The maximum period for granting access is limited to one year, for security reasons.

Salesforce Knowledge Enhancements – Stemming on Article Searches

Stemming on Article Searches is now available for seven more languages. Stemming is available for organizations in which the default language is Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or Swedish.  For more information, see Stemming Behavior with Salesforce Knowledge Article Searches in the Salesforce online help.

Salesforce Mobile for Android Phones – Beta

A beta version of Salesforce Mobile is now available for Android phones! Use it to access your Salesforce data, tasks, and calendar from your Android phone, even when you’re not connected to a Wi-Fi network. Salesforce Mobile for Android phones also integrates with native Android features, allowing you to make calls, send email, and map addresses by tapping fields on  Salesforce records.

Customers in Private Chatter Groups

This feature is automatically visible to all users, not just administrators as had been indicated previously.