It’s that time year again. Salesforce CRM is ready for the next quarterly update. I received an email a few days ago that NA1 (our instance) will be upgraded on October 3.

Got a chance to read through the release notes, and here’s what news & interesting to us:

Case Teams – By default, cases have a single owner. This looks like we’ll have the ability to assign a team to a case as well as an individual owner. Right now, we have one staff member who processes cases through our call center. I can see this being very useful as the program grows. But this line from the release notes makes this feature not so useful yet: “Currently, you cannot report on case teams.”

Storage increases – Currently, the Enterprise edition gives us 1 GB of “General Storage” and 250 MB of “Document Storage.” C3 is using 12% of each. Now Salesforce is defining storage as “data” or “file” which seems more intuitive. Organizations are now given a minimal allotment of 1 GB for each type, with additional storage of 20 MB of data and 100 MB of files per user.

Email to Salesforce improvements – If you bcc the unique Email to Salesforce address, the email is added to the activity history of the contact. Now in Winter ’09, the email is also added to the activity history of any (?) opportunity that the user is assigned as a contact role. This is fabulous. We try to remember to associate the email with the opportunity manually, but I have to admit I forget to do so more often than not. Let’s hope Spring ’09 adds this functionality to cases as well.

Schedule and Email Reports – Love it. We’re making a lot of use of the ability to schedule and email dashboards. I admit to putting things in dashboards simply for this functionality. I can think of at least 10 different reports where it will be useful to have an email sent to certain users on a regular basis.