The following information is from a presentation given at the local Dreamforce in Philadelphia on March 3, 2005.

Summer 2005 Release (June ?)

The big four are:

• Custom Tabs and Objects in the Professional and Team Editions â¬? This brings much of the customization and power of the Enterprise Edition down to the lower-priced versions, for no extra cost.
• Custom Formula Fields â¬? You will be able to create custom fields that are calculations based on other fields. Essentially, the functionality of the formulas will mimic what is available in Excel, so you have both mathematical and logical formulas. The fields, once created, can be used in views, reports, lists, etc.
• Customizable Standard Related Lists â¬? Standard Related Lists are the lists that appear on detail screens and on the initial screens for things like contacts, leads, opportunities, etc. At present, you can not change the fields that are displayed. In the new version, you can add/remove any available field AND sort on any column.
• New Offline Edition â¬? The Offline Edition is free with the Enterprise Edition or $25 per user per month for the Professional Edition. Currently, the offline edition downloads data as XML strings. With large amounts of data, this tends to bog things down, so there are limits to the number accounts, accounts, and activities that can be downloaded. Also, you cannot download lead information. In the new offline version, a small SQL engine will be included on your offline machine. This speeds things up, and will provide a ten-fold increase in records across the board. Also, leads and custom objects can be brought offline. To summarize:

Record Type          Current Limit   New Limit

Accounts               500                   5.000

Contacts                4,000                40,000

Opportunities        4,000                40,000

Tasks                     6,000                60,000

Events                    6,000                60,000

Leads                     0                      Not sure

Custom Objects     0                      Not sure

Several other new features were mentioned briefly, but without as much the details as the previous four. The list is:

• Salesforce
• Customizable Forecasts â¬? no details.
• Address Cleanup Tools â¬? no specifics.
• â¬?ORâ¬? List View filter â¬? Same type of advanced filter available now in reports.
• Territory Realignment Tools â¬? No details.
• Sales Methodology Integration â¬? Improved Miller-Heinman and some other, unnamed, new ones.
• New Outlook Edition â¬? No details.
• Exception Highlighting â¬? Ability to flag values in a report that are too high or too low.
• SupportForce
• Email-to-case â¬? no details.
• Style Sheet Editor â¬? no details.
• Sforce
• Bulk data loader â¬? Will allow the uploading of opportunities, cases, etc.
• Offline API â¬? This will allow the offline version to access other data and tools on the offline computer.
• Single sign on/Delegated Authentication â¬? Will permit logons to be authenticated by a Windows logon.
• Self Service API â¬? No details.