Summer ‘14 is here! One of the best features of the Salesforce1 Platform is the fact that 3 times a year, every year, we get a slew of new features and updates - all for free! I honestly know of no other platform of a similar size that manages that. It is something I am forever telling customers as they get it all for free as well, and any products you have out there are also upgraded for free.
Here are my personal top 5 picks from the release notes:
1. Describe Limits Removed
This is going to make writing more powerful and dynamic code a lot easier for developers. It is yet another instance of Salesforce providing more processing power for developers, something I have seen in almost every release. I was one of those who found the addition of the describe calls an extremely helpful addition for adding a new level of functionality - this is a pleasing add on to that.
2. Future Methods With Higher Limits
Following on from above, again more processing power but here I like how it can be targeted to a specific limit to cater for fringe cases. Most instances of people using future methods are where they need to process a particularly large job and send it off to work in the background, and I think the ability to increase the limits for these sort of operations is a great addition.
3. Larger File Attachments
Obviously I am a Salesforce user as well as a developer and I am fortunate enough to get to work with some of the largest Salesforce customers in the world. One of the downsides of these large projects is the size and volume of documentation that can be produced which you want to attach to a specific record relating the project. This is a simple update but a nice one for all users.
4. Query Plan Tool
This looks to be a great new tool for developers to use in order to improve the quality of their code. Hopefully most developers on the platform will utilise this tool fully in order to improve their query performance and produce faster and more scalable applications. As Salesforce is a multi-tenant platform, people having faster queries in general is a win for everyone.
5. Increased Number of External Id Fields
This ties in with the query plan tool. Anybody who has worked with large datasets knows what a difference correct indexing for queries can make and the ability to define more external Ids is a helpful way of again allowing people to improve their query performance.
Those are my top 5 - hard to choose only 5. What are yours?