An Introduction to Force.com Winter-12 release updates and Features

A complete world of freedom on cloud, lets make the business freely on cloud
Force. Com Platform (Freedom for the world on Business Class)	New Release with lot of new features & Updates (Blessings Developers and Business Applications)

Force.com Editions-new Release in October-2011, “Winter-12”.

As we know the Force.com Platform has blessed the Force.com Developers with many freedoms and relaxations in Governor and Limits with the Summer-11 Release.

Force.com Platform has given many freedoms to the world so that the Force.com application can be integrated with any running in-house application.

1.       Social Contacts: Salesforce is providing an Social Enterprise Solution by this key feature. We can now stay connected and get the updates from our contacts by their social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn too.

2.       Database.Com: Database.com is included with force.com in Developer, Enterprise and unlimited Editions of SalesForce. It can be purchased as a standalone service when an application needs a database.

3.       Permission-Sets: Permission-Sets in Winter-12 allow you to grant additional permissions to specific users. Permission-Sets allow granting additional permissions to a type of existing profile without modifying the profile.

4.       Schema Builder: The Schema Builder provides a graphical view of salesforce objects and their relationships.

5.       Chatter Rest API: The Chatter Rest API is a tool set for integrating chatter data with non-Salesforce applications.

6.       Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Support: JSON is used to import and export data using API.  JSON is  an Object Based Language to import and Export Data to or from Salesforce Application.

7.       Cloud Based- Flow Designer: It is a cloud based flow designer for visual workflow is available as a better feature.It has a few button and three simple tabs which has all the elements that are used to create the flow. With the cloud based designer the number of elements and resources has been greatly reduced and reorganized to make it simpler and faster to build the flow which automates your business processes.

8.       SiteForce: It is a Facility provided about SalesForce to customer that he can build his public site like other websites within some click and can place there salesforce data on the site. All the building of this website will be done in clicks.

9.       Force.com Productivity Enhancements: There are several functionality provided by salesforce with Winter-12 released to enhance the productivity like default landing page, homepage tools, quick links, easy to build salesforce app and appExchange, and some more.

10.   Data.com: Building on the functionality you are familiar with of Jigsaw, Data.com is providing several new features.

11.   Chatter Enhancements: Salesforce is updating its chatter features and functionality day by day. So in this again its providing many exciting features which is easy to access and flexible.

Some more features are available with Salesforce, We will discuss all this features in detail in my upcoming posts.

12.   SalesForce For Outlook Enhancements

13.   Forecasts

15.  Analytical Snapshot

In Addition to all of this features Apex has few of other updates too in Winter-12 such as,

New system methods:  isBatch(), isFuture(), and isScheduled()

Allow for determination of the manner in which the code was invoked.

Used to execute different code if run is batch, part of an @future method, or via the Apex scheduler.

Raised Governor Limits for batch Apex and @future methods

SOQL queries raised from 100 to 200.

Code statements raised from 200,000 to 1000000

Heap Size raised from 3MB to 6MB

New @ReadOnly annotation for Web services and schedulable interface

Allows unrestricted database queries

Prevents any DML operations within request

API for asynchronous test runs (BETA)

Allows developers to create asynchronous test runs

Public Test Classes

Test classes no longer need to be private

Allow for creating reusable public test classes for common test data creation

Force.com Developer Console

Renamed and improved from the previous System Log Console

Continued improvement and addition of new tools
Hope the information given above is useful for you all as i personally feel it useful so i shared this with we all SalesForce Developer and aspirants.

I expect the same sharing process continues from you all.

Comment and Suggestion will be appreciable from my side.

Please rectify me if I am wrong somewhere in this post so that I can deliver and share the quality data with all.

For further information, Please refer Winter-12 Release Notes.
For further Dicussion, Please contact me through this blog itself by your valuable comments which i am expecting.

Thanks,
Amit Goyal