Salesforce.com For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 23

Ten Ways to Drive More Productivity

Salesforce.com drives much of its feature updates based on its existing road map and requests from customers just like you. A few times per year, salesforce.com comes out with a new release of its award-winning service. That’s the benefit of this family of business applications, which may be referred to as “cloud-based” or “in the cloud” because the infrastructure isn’t maintained by you. Unlike traditional software upgrades, these releases are immediately available to all customers and can be activated or deactivated when you are ready to make the change.

Keeping track of all the cool new updates that salesforce.com releases can get a little overwhelming. The speed with which it’s able to roll out releases is often barely faster than our ability to write all about it and get it in print to you! On the flip side, perhaps you do keep track of the newest features but have been struggling with an apparent feature limitation or would like more advice on how to best implement a particular feature.

Fortunately for us, both salesforce.com and its community of users strongly believe in helping each other out to make every customer successful. Through a variety of channels, the salesforce.com community shares best practices and offers suggestions and work-arounds for even the toughest head-scratcher questions.

In this chapter, we summarize five essential resources that every user in your organization should know about. Then we cover five ...