I’ve just installed the new version of the Salesforce Mobile app for the iPhone—and connected to it to my Developer Edition environment! Check it out!

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As I blogged in New Developer Edition Orgs, the new Developer Edition orgs (free), have additional licenses. Well, 2 of those licenses are Salesforce Mobile licenses, so this means you can install and iPhone and app and start playing. As you develop your applications, you can easily see what the behavior on the iPhone (or BlackBerry) will be, and modify accordingly.

You also have full control over the device and its data if you’re an administrator. Head off to the Setup menu and under Administration Setup, where you’ll find the “Mobile Users and Devices” link. As you’ll see from the following screenshot, you can use this to deactivate a mobile device, erase data etc.

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By default the iPhone app shows some of the standard objects such as Contacts and Cases. I hardly ever use these, so here’s how to configure the platform to show you what you want. Select the “Mobile Configuration” menu item and create a new mobile configuration. This is something you can assign to users or profiles to determine what appears on their device:

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That “Data Sets” section is pretty important. Hitting Edit allows you to select what data sets should be included in the mobile configuration:

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As you can see, you can also use filters to determine which records will be synced.

Once I’d done that, including my Mileage object, my iPhone then displayed a single Mileages button at the bottom (instead of all those other standard objects). I think it uses the same icon as the tab I have – there’s a car there too!

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Here are a few things I’ve learned:

  • Because the data is synced, it also works offline.
  • You can add, edit, view and delete records
  • The mobile configuration and the security profiles determine who has access to which data. In fact, you can grant different security permissions to data for mobile devices (versus logging in via the web).
  • The “Erase all Data” option on the “Mobile Users and Devices” menu item shown above, seems to send a message to my iPhone (I had the Salesforce app open) – because a second later the Salesforce Mobile app kicked me back to the start page and requested my credentials. Over the air deactivation 🙂

I’ll be connecting with the Salesforce Mobile team after Dreamforce to arrange a webinar/article on this stuff – in the mean time, enjoy the new app!

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