Two Updates From Salesforce.com

So, with the beginning of April comes a little spring cleaning from Salesforce.com.  Received a couple of emails around some enhancements to the Salesforce application, one incorporated now, and another released on Monday, April 6.

1. – Changes to Email detail page in Customer and Partner Portal

Currently, there is no differentiation between the email message detail page, whether viewed through Salesforce.com or the Customer or Partner Portal.  To fix this, Salesforce.com set the default on the email related list to be off.  IF you wish for your clients or partners to have access to all emails through a case in one of the portal applications, simply edit your page layout and add the email related list.  You can get here by clicking Setup | App Setup | Customize| Cases | Page Layouts.

2. Opportunity Save Change – affecting Workflow Rules and Triggers

With the Spring’09 edition of Salesforce.com, a change in the application “ensures that standard and custom opportunity save logic is triggered when updates are made to the Opportunity, Opportunity Products or Schedules that cause an update to the parent record”.  Or, in laymans terms – changes to the products associated with an opportunity, or the revenue or product scheduling finally allow worfklow rules or apex triggers to fire on the parent opportunity record (as if the record was edited!).

This, however, could mean issue with existing workflows or triggers.  If your organization uses:

• Opportunity/Opportunity Product Custom Validation Rule
• Opportunity/Opportunity Product Apex Trigger
• Opportunity/Opportunity Product Universally Required Custom Field
• Opportunity/Opportunity Product Unique Custom Field
• Opportunity/Opportunity Product Workflow Rule (Field Update/Email/Task)

then you may need to reassess the workflow/trigger, so that an endless loop workflow or trigger cycle doesn’t occur (and those are always bad things…).  Good news is, Salesforce.com has given you an idea on whether or not your instance of Salesforce is affected or not.  The email you receive will let you know whether or not they believe you are affected right under the How will this change impact me? header.

If the email your administrator receives says “Based on our analysis, the change will not affect your application.”, nothing needs to be done.  The critical update will be installed and activated.  However, if it says “Your organization has a customization that may be affected as a result of this update”, then the critical update will be available but deactivated.

If you need to test out your workflows, I would recommend the following:

1. Click through to the Critical Updates page (Setup | App Setup | Critical Updates)and read the release notes on the critical update.
2. If you have EE/UE, use a sandbox to test the existing workflows and triggers to ensure that nothing nefarious occurs when the update and your customizations play together.
3. If you are on PE, I would work with the administrator and/or developer to ensure that the critical update and workflow or trigger work together.

There is some time before the critical update will be activated for all customers on December 15, 2009.  So, hopefully eight months warning is is sufficient time for those affected to make any changes required.