If you haven’t signed up for a Developer Edition (DE)
environment lately, you will probably be pleasantly surprised with the expanded
capabilities of this free offering.

Jon Mountjoy already blogged
about some of the basic look-and-feel changes to DE, but the even bigger news
is the increased capacity of this edition.

First of all, the two full Salesforce CRM licenses, a
standard of DE, have been supplemented with three additional Platform
licenses. A Salesforce CRM license can
access all standard and custom objects, while Platform license user can only
access the Account, Contact and Document standard objects, as well as all
custom objects. The bottom line—you
now have up to five users for your custom Force.com application, a feature
which came in really handy when creating examples for the new Developer Guide book.

But wait — that’s not all. 
You also get 2 feature licenses each for the Marketing application, Mobile
usage and Offline usage (described in the on-line help).  A feature license allows you to use the
functionality of a license with an existing user, so you can assign these
features to any of your standard Salesforce users or your Platform users.

Is that enough? Maybe, but there is even more!  You also get two different sets of Portal
user licenses – 10 Customer Service Portal licenses and 5 Partner Portal
licenses.  A portal is a way to give
privileges to a Contact to see data inside your Force.com environment. The
Customer Service Portal and Partner Portal licenses grant access to a different
set of standard objects, as well as all custom objects.

The new DE environment gives you a larger number of users and a much
broader range of functionality.  New
Developer Edition environments will come with the full complement of licenses,
but existing orgs will not receive the license enhancements.