Chatter Messenger — Generally Available from Summer 12 Release

Available in: Group, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Contact Manager, and Developer Editions

Chatter Messenger will allow for secure instant messaging for people that follow one another using Chatter. By default, Chatter Messenger will be enabled for any organization that uses Chatter, including Chatter Free and Chatter Only licenses.

We can:

 

ü  Enable and Disable Chat from our Salesforce.com Org completely or for only Visualforce Pages

ü  Change Chat Status

People can see our status and collaborate real-time

•       In their chat lists

•       On our profile page

•       On people hovers

ü  Chat Real time and collaborate with People

§  We can start a chat with anyone we follow, whether it is a colleague or a partner

§  Optionally, we can add up to 10 people to the chat when we for greater collaboration

ü  Adding/Removing People to the My Favorites List in Chat

§  The list of people we follow in Chatter can be long. Add up to 100 chats with one or more people to our My Favorites list and they’ll always show up at the top of our chat list.

§  Remove chats with one or multiple people from our My Favorites list if we chat with them less often

ü  Popping Out Chat Windows

§  Keep chatting—even when we minimize our browser or use other applications—by popping out a chat or our chat list into a separate browser window.

ü Adding Emoticons to a Chat like  :-), :), :], =)  :/, :-/, :\, :-\

ü  Edit Chat Options like changing status to away and sound notifications to make it more friendlier

Metadata API

Exploring the Metadata API

Well, I started exploring Metadata API after a long pause of more than 2.5 years (last time I touched Metadata APIs was early 2009).

According to SFDC .. "Use the Metadata API to retrieve, deploy, create, update or delete customization information, such as custom object definitions and page layouts, for your organization. This API is intended for managing customizations and for building tools that can manage the metadata model, not the data itself.

To use the Metadata API, your organization must use Enterprise Edition, Unlimited Edition, Free Edition, or Developer Edition.

Development Platforms

The Metadata API supports both file-based and CRUD-based development.

File-Based Development

The declarative or file-based asynchronous Metadata API deploy() and retrieve() calls deploy or retrieve a .zip file that holds components in a set of folders, and a manifest file named pa

ckage.xml.

CRUD-Based Development

The CRUD-based asynchronous Metadata API calls create(), update(), and delete() act upon the metadata components in a manner similar to the way synchronous

API calls in the enterprise WSDL act upon objects."

This opens up a whole new world of integration possibilities with any salesforce.com org.

We can virtually change the configuration - add/ delete custom objects, fields etc using simple CRUD based calls. Isn't that amazing !

Now here comes the sad part - CRUD based calls can

not be used to create/update/delete the custom coding components like apex class, apex trigger etc. Wonder when Salesforce.com is going to give that to us?

I tried still doing that and it gave "INVALID_TYPE: This type of object is not available for this organization" (as if it were a permissions error..well still hopeful that this may change within the next few releases.

Vote for the idea https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000gcBBAAY

Another thing I would just love to have on Metadata

API is a way to retrieve active/inactive state of components and preferably change them too. That is it would be great if i could just query all the triggers in my org and see if they are active or inactive and then them too. May be SFDC could enhance their "ListMetadataQuery" function to do the same

Vote for the idea https://sites.secure.force.com/success/ideaView?id=08730000000gcBGAAY

Updating UserTerritories via Code

It happens only on Salesforce.com.

Many objects which cannot be updated by Apex are available for updates by web-services. e.g. UserTerritories.
These are still updateable by Webservices API, Ajax Toolkit.

So essentially other systems utilizing SFDC webservices can update it, but not Apex which and is interpreted, executed, and controlled entirely by the Force.com platform.