Most of you have probably started receiving email notifications about your Winter 10 upgrade. I browsed through the release notes and highlighted a few of the many new features which will be rolled out in this release.

1. Filtered Lookups (Beta) – Yes, after years they are finally delivering this! So, you will be able to filter a lookup field and say “only show record type = participants” for this lookup. This will be HUGE for many NPO’s. Please Note: As this will be in Beta release some filters will not be supported. You will have to read the release notes for specifics, however, the good news is that record type filtering is indeed supported.
2. Campaign Summaries – We can now do rollup metrics on Campaign Member Status.
3. More Complex Charts – Dashboard Charts are now more complex. We can now report on two dimensions rather than previously supported single dimension. We can hover over segments of a chart to see the underlying data. We can click on a segment of a chart and drill down to a filtered report by that segment. We can have an “Others” area on charts.
4. Workflow Email Alrts – Set the FROM Address – No longer do workflows need to be fired by a designated person, we will be able to define the From Address.
5. ISBLANK and BLANKVALUE: Any of you that have ever written a formula have struggled with the fact that ISNULL is kind of tricky. They have a superior form of this now in ISBLANK which will work for all field types except picklists. This should make formula writing a lot easier.
6. Comments in a Formula – We will be able to embed comments within a formula ex. /* some comment here */.
7. Ten Relationships – The cross-object relationship limit has been extended from 5 to 10.
8. Help Text on Standard Fields – Another long awaited feature. You can now add help text to all standard fields.
9. Cloud Deploy – We can now move configuration from Sandboxes directly to Production without using an IDE and XML.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. I would strongly encourage you to review the full release notes for more details on any of the above items as well as the comprehensive list of Winter 10 release features.