Since Dreamforce, there has been a lot of talk about how Apex will help nonprofits better leverage Salesforce.  Oh yeah, did I mention Apex is available for all nonprofits: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/upgrade.  For more info see: http://tinyurl.com/2ej42w .  Over the weekend, sf.com released Winter ‘08 with all sorts of goodies that I think will be valuable for many of us. See Features page: http://blogs.salesforce.com/features/winter_08_release/

• Group Tasks and Inline Editing: All I can say is Hallelujah! 

• Campaign Enhancements:  Steve Andersen may be single handedly responsible for many of the Campaign enhancements we see in Winter ‘08 (Thank you Mr. Andersen).  Similar to Accounts and Cases, we now have the ability to create hierarchies in campaigns.  Many programs use campaigns to do both outreach and event management, but until now those campaigns have remained disparate from one another (or grouped with a kludgy custom object). Now under a single parent campaign its possible to track and report on all activities in a single effort. 

• Relational Business Rules:  This is huge!  This provides us the ability to create cross object validation and approval rules. For example you can trigger a workflow rule on multiple criteria on both the account and opportunity records. However, its only possible to base these rules on standard fields.

• Salesforce to Salesforce: This new feature allows data to be shared across instances of sf.com. Perhaps I’m off on this one, but I see possibilities for affiliated networks, intra-organizational program collaboration (those pesky joint funding collabs), and perhaps inter-organizational instance sharing (one for fundraising, one for program).  Be interested in hearing how others think this new feature might be utilized.

• Safari: Don’t forget to try sf.com in Safari…its incredibly fast and a great production environment.

While I am very grateful for the donation of Apex to nonprofits, I would love to see the addition of other features in future releases (either donated or at a reduced cost):

• Visualforce
• Customer Portal
• Salesforce Ideas
• Salesforce Content

And please please…add roll-up summaries to all objects. (Pretty please).

What are your the features that you find most valuable?