Our partner Arrowpointe has a great post about one of the new features in the Spring ‘10 release, Aggregate functions.

The Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) is familiar to anyone with SQL experience, however, it has always lacked some more advanced functions. This gap along with some of the Apex governor limits can sometimes make it very difficult to slice and dice data to meet your needs. The new Aggregate functions are a huge improvement to SOQL and returns grouped query results so you don’t have to loop through them in your code.

Check out more details at www.arrowpointe.com

With the Spring ‘10 release coming up, it’s time for you to take another release maintenance exam to maintain your salesforce.com certification credential. If you’ve never taken one of these exams before, they’re basically a short quiz on the release notes.

You can start studying now by reviewing the Spring ’10 Release Notes and the Spring ’10 Release Training.

The training and exams seem a little more complex this release. There are four modules, and depending on which certification you hold, you have to focus on different ones.
Salesforce.com Certified Administrators: General Features, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud
Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developers: General Features, Custom Cloud

Have any questions on the release? Post them in the comments.

Salesforce.com will be performing some longer than usual maintenance on the NA3 server on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 from 7:00pm PST to Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 3:00am PST. Typically these long windows mean some type of hardware maintenance, so this probably is unrelated to the Spring ‘10 release.

As always you can see all upcoming maintenance windows at http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ (ironically, this maintenance window is not currently shown on the page due to the long list of upcoming maintenance windows for the Spring ‘10 release).

If you didn’t already spend the whole weekend playing with Spring ‘10 features in your sandbox then you’re a few days behind us. This past Friday night, salesforce.com upgraded sandbox orgs on the cs0, cs2, and cs3 servers.

Visit the ideaExchange for the list of new features.

Click here to view the entire sandbox upgrade schedule.

What’s your favorite new feature?

Salesforce.com sent out the below notice last night about a change to the custom object creation process in the Spring ‘10 release. The basic change is that from now on when you create a new custom object, the default permissions for all profiles will be to not have access to that object (as opposed to the current behavior which is to have complete access).

Overall, this seems like a really trivial change that doesn’t do much. Afterall, when you create a custom object, you’re presented with a screen listing all profiles and the access you want to give them. But wait, there’s more. The notice goes on to say that the ability to modify security persmissions for custom objects will not exist on standard profiles. This means that the next time you create a custom object, you will have to ensure that all of your users (who need access to it) are assigned to a custom profile and not a standard one. Again, not that big a deal since there’s already a function to create a custom profile based on a standard profile.

This change seems to be oriented toward larger enterprise customers who have many profiles and security requirements. It will save them time and help meet their security requirements when creating new custom objects. For the rest of us, it’s just a few more clicks than we used to make.

Here’s the notice in case you didn’t get it emailed to you:

Dear Administrator,

At salesforce.com, trust is our top priority, and it is our goal to ensure that any changes we make have a minimal impact on your business processes. You are receiving this email because we have identified you as a system administrator of a Salesforce organization that may be affected by a change to Custom Object permissions in the Spring ’10 release.

What is the change?
In Spring ‘10, when you create a new custom object, the “Read,” “Create,” “Edit,” “Delete,” “View All,” and “Modify All” permissions for that object will be disabled by default. After the Spring ’10 release, you must specify which users should get access to custom objects.

Note: You can only change the object permissions for custom profiles, not standard profiles. As a result, users with standard profiles (except System Administrator) will not be able to access custom objects created after the Spring ’10 release.
How will this change impact me?
If you have users assigned to standard profiles, clone these profiles and reassign your users to the newly created profiles. Then, when you create a new custom object, you will edit the user profiles to enable object permissions. Additionally, you can use enhanced profile management to edit multiple profiles at once.
Note: For custom objects created before the Spring ’10 release, access to these objects will not change. Therefore, standard profiles will continue to have access to custom objects created prior to the Spring ’10 release.

When is this change taking place?
This change will be made with the Spring ‘10 release. Please check http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/#maint to understand when your instance will be upgraded.
How can I get more information?
Customer Support works in conjunction with our Technology & Products team and is equipped to answer your questions.

Best regards,
-salesforce.com Customer Support