The weather outside is frightful, but Spring is right around the corner. Spring ’13, that is. Spring is here!

Here are just a few things we’ll be delivering in this release.

User-Focused Help
We broke up the huge 4000+ page “How to be Successful with Salesforce” user guide into 14 new downloadable guides, divided by role, Salesforce product area, and experience level. Now  you can download only the guides that are relevant to you.  The new guides include “Salesforce Basics” for new users, “Set Up and Maintain Your Salesforce Organization” for administrators, “Collaborate with Everyone” for Chatter users, “Enhance Salesforce with Code” for developers, and more!  See the release notes for the complete list.

We reorganized the help to fit into the new guides, and you’ll see that new structure reflected in the online help table of contents.

Salesforce Touch and Touch Dashboards
Salesforce Touch is now generally available! In addition, you can now view dashboards in Salesforce Touch. Access the Dashboards tab from the tab panel to browse up to 15 recently viewed dashboards at a time.

Chatter Tasks (Beta)
Now Salesforce shows tasks when and where you need to see them to track work effectively. As soon as a task is created on a record such as a lead, an account, or a custom object, the task appears right in the Chatter feed for that record.

State and Country Picklists (Beta)
State and country picklists allow users to select states and countries from predefined, standardized lists, instead of entering state and country data into text fields. This beta release of state and country picklists makes the picklists available in the shipping, billing, mailing, and “other” address fields in the Salesforce standard objects Account, Contact, Contract, Lead, Person Accounts, Quotes, and Service Contracts.

Connect in Apex (Developer Preview)
Connect in Apex is automatically available in all Developer Edition organizations. For information on enabling Connect in Apex in other editions, contact Salesforce. Connect in Apex exposes many Chatter API resources as objects in Apex. Use Connect in Apex to build Chatter integrations and custom UI on Force.com without making HTTP callouts to the Chatter API.

Force.com Canvas Updates
Force.com Canvas was released in pilot in Winter ’13. In Spring ’13, it continues to be pilot and we’ve added lots of new features. Here are a few:

  • You can now expose a canvas app on a Visualforce page by using the new <apex:canvasApp> component. This means you can display a canvas app anywhere you can display a Visualforce page.
  • The SDK is now versioned. The SDK version matches the API version, and is 27.0 in this release. You can get the version information by calling the version method.
  • New Version and Client objects have been added and the Parameters object has moved from the CanvasRequest object to the Environment object.
  • Force.com Canvas now supports Internet Explorer version 8. This is in addition to Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

Improved Forecasting
You can now forecast by quarters, up to 12 months or eight quarters in the future or past. You can also now forecast using partner opportunities.

Enhanced Ability to Take Sites Offline
When you take a Site.com site offline, you can now release its Site.com Published Site license to reuse it to publish another site.

Now that you’ve had a taste of Spring, don’t you want more?  Read the full release notes here:  Salesforce Spring ’13 Preview Release Notes

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