In advance of taking the Spring ’15 certification maintenance exams I’ve been reading the release notes one more time, with a focus on the broader picture, not just the platform elements and headline features that catch the eye during the pre-release phase. I tend to follow this regimen for every release and inevitably the detail of a number of smaller features/announcements are picked up that were simply skimmed on the first review, or indeed added to a later version of the release notes – this happens (so always check you have the latest version). In regard to Spring ’15 the low-key features of interest relate to Chatter and are covered briefly below.
1. Add Records to Chatter Groups
With this feature it’s possible to relate arbitrary records to a Chatter Group via the “Add Record” publisher action on the Group Layout (this needs to be configured). The utility of this feature appears to be twofold; convenience and communication. For example, if we have a collaboration group for a sales campaign, we can now list the targeted account records on the group page and access via a convenient link. It would seem that the relationship is one-way, it doesn’t appear possible to view the groups to which a record is related from the record detail page. Note, feed posts at the record level are not shared with the group.
2. Question-to-Case (GA)
Chatter Questions is a great collaboration feature in its own right, enabling expertise across the internal or external community to be brought to bear on posts structured as questions, with specific functions for answers, mark-as-best etc. As the name implies Question-to-Case allows a question to be escalated to a case from within the feed, with the feed post marked visibly as such.
A further extension to this feature, Knowledge Deflection for Chatter Questions is currently in beta. The functionality of this should be evident.
3. Action Links (GA)
Buttons can be added to feed posts that download a file, access a web page or call a 3rd party API. Action links can be grouped within an Action Link Template and packaged for ISV distribution. Action links are functionally very interesting, given the use cases they open-up, however the implementation is non-trivial and warrants a follow-up post.
It’s interesting to see how the Chatter product continues to evolve release-on-release. The direction the product is taking appears sensible, i.e. finer grained control via increased Trigger coverage (custom moderation etc.), richer content previews and extended external integration capability. Top of my wish list incidentally would be an enhancement to Topics to allow post activity from associated records (Topics for Objects) to be automatically shared and pushed out to topic followers via digests. This could be an optional flag that marks the topic as aggregating. With this model, users can simply follow a topic and have content pushed to them proactively that is either directly related (feed post association) or indirectly (feed post against an associated record). Such a feature would really help transition many notification use cases from email/task to Chatter.