Salesforce will officially put the Spring ’12 release into the wild in early February. We’ve reviewed the official release notes in detail (get your own copy here).

As the release approaches we’ve hit thebutton on five of the top features. This list is written from a user and administrator perspective for people who both use and configure Salesforce systems on a daily basis. Be sure to add the features you’re looking forward to most in the comments section. Enjoy and happy Spring ’12!

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A lot of folks have used the Spring framework to build applications – and what’s not to love? It’s allowed us to solve enterprise problems with a minimum of tedium. And the framework has evolved to address criticisms, for example the continued reduction in need for lengthy XML configuration in application contexts in favor of ever more terse syntax and support for code annotations.

The framework as-packaged includes facilities to help with many common aspects of contemporary application development, from a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework to  integration with persistence managers and elegant transaction management. But it doesn’t necessarily cover every need. One example of a gap is batch processing.

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In part 1 of this series, I discussed the benefits of usability testing on enterprise software projects and outlined a general approach for integrating the practice of usability testing into a typical Scrum project (see diagram below). In this post, I’ll lay out a 3-step process for performing a usability test on an enterprise project, and highlight how it can can hook into the standard elements of Scrum (e.g. burndown, backlog, etc.). Here we go…

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