Spring ’15 is loaded with some great new features. I’ve read the 300+ pages of release notes so that you don’t have to. Since I have clients that use Professional Edition, I am going to cover features that are coming for both Professional and Enterprise Edition, and that are free. Here is a brief look at what‘s coming, that meet my criterion.

Notes Upgrade – Okay, the “Notes and Attachments” related list has always been rudimentary. You could add a Note to a record, but it’s always been very plain. Now salesforce delivered an Idea submitted by users to beef this up. This will now be rich text entry vs. plain text, suggest a title based on the date of entry, and allow users to select who to share the Note with. The new Notes object is reportable and searchable, too. Users can follow a Note via Chatter. I sounds as if you will need to apply to get this turn on. Once it’s turned on, all new Notes will be generated using this new process. Hey, I think it’s worth it.

Duplication Management – Other than the standard capability to find and merge Lead duplicates, salesforce has always left it up to the AppExchange providers to solve this issue. Now you get some native functionality. You can also do cross-object matching. What does that mean? It means you can check if a Lead is already in salesforce as a Contact. You can even set your own matching rules, which makes this really useful. This new functionality uses Data.com technology, but does not require a Data.com license. Not yet, at least…..

Assets Object Redesigned as a Standard Object – it’s about time here. I’ve had to create customizations in the past to allow Assets to appear as a Tab, and now it’s standard. And, because Assets will be a standard object, we get Record Types, Sharing Rules, and even field history tracking.

Subscribe to Report Notifications – Your users can now sign up for report notifications, to stay up-to-date on the metrics they care about most. Subscribe to a report and set the conditions that should trigger notification. For example, subscribe to an open-issues report and get notified every morning whenever there are more than 20 open issues. Notifications are delivered right to the subscriber, via Salesforce1 notifications, Chatter, or email. Very nice!!

Inactive Users – It used to be that you could not create or edit a record owned by an inactive user. This was a system admin pain – you had to activate them, make the change, and then de-activate them. This is now fixed.

Maps – this is still a bit murky until we see it, but we are getting what appears to be a Google Map below the address. You can click into it to drill into the actual Google Map. Could be useful. My concern is using valuable screen real estate, unless you really need this. Looks as if we can opt-out of this one, if desired.

There are other features coming, but I only wanted to highlight those coming that apply to Professional Edition as well. Some of this will even be seen in Group Edition, but as usual, poor Group Edition gets starved, while Enterprise lounges on the beach ordering drinks.