Geolocation Feature in Summer ’12

As soon as I read about it, I got excited. The news is Salesforce is providing the GeoLocations support and is in Pilot program in Summer ’12 release. I have been huge fan of Geolocations capabilities since using it in one of the Mobile App Dev project that I was working seperately.

I quickly raised a case in Salesforce to nominate my Dev org for this pilot program. I just got the reply from Salesforce folks that they accepted it.

The Geolocation is a new composite field type, which has two components: longitude and latitude. It can be added to any object. Decimal point precision can be set. Users have the choice to display coordinates in decimal point or degree, minute, and second notations.

Simple test that I did was I added a new field(geolocation__c) in my Account object of type Geolocation (ofcourse).
I updated some of my existing Accounts by randomly adding dummy values to this field. Then I ran the following apex in my developer console to search all Accounts within the 1 mile radius of a given Geolocation.

List<Account> accts = [SELECT Name FROM Account WHERE DISTANCE(geolocation__c, GEOLOCATION(37.794915,-122.394733), ‘mi’) <= 1];
System.debug(‘Count: ‘ +accts.size());
for(Account acct : accts)
System.debug(‘Account: ‘ +acct.Name);

Neat, I got the desired result. The possibility is huge. I look forward to using it for various purposes.

Salesforce Summer 12 Release Preview

The Sandbox Preview window for Summer ‘12 is scheduled to begin May 11, 2012.

Some of the features coming up in Summer 12:

1. IE6 is no longer supported.
2. Chatter Messenger is now generally available.
3. Availability of Shared Activities, which lets users relate non-recurring and non-group tasks to as many as 10 contacts.
4. Introducing Open CTI. Open CTI lets developers build CTI systems that integrate with Salesforce without the use of CTI adapters.
5. Reports: Users can Drag and drop reports into Folders, and they have new icons to help differentiate if a folder contains Reports or Dashboards, and few additional searching capabilities.
6. Cross-Block Custom Summary Formulas, user will be able to create formula field between summarized totalizations of different Report Types. The new feature Joined Reports introduced in Spring 12 allowed users to put the total amount of two different reports types together in the report. This new feature allow users to make formulas between it.
7. Combination charts (also known as multimetric charts) were previously available only in the report builder. Now we can set up a combination chart directly from the dashboard component editor
8. Salesforce Mobile:
   • Salesforce Mobile is now generally available for Android tablets.
   • The new version of the Chatter mobile app works on both the iPad and iPhone.
   • Salesforce Touch, also referred to as touch.salesforce.com, is a version of Salesforce that is designed specifically for touchscreen mobile devices.

More at:
https://prerellogin.pre.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_summer12_release_notes.pdf

Update: Release Notes now available here.