The Spring '15 Release is now available in all Salesforce accounts and this release comes with some great additions to the Salesforce experience. While this is not an exhaustive list of all the new enhancements, here are some of the best highlights of what's now available to Salesforce users:

Subscribe to Reports – You can receive report notifications via e-mail, chatter or Salesforce1 based on specific criteria that you establish. For example, your Executive Director might want to know when your annual fund donations reach a certain level. You can program the report subscription to send them a notification when your annual fund report's amount sum reaches that level. Each user can have up to five of these subscriptions at a time.

Duplicate Alerts - Duplicate alerts are now available. If you enter a record which is identified as a duplicate, you will get notified before saving the new record. Administrators can configure the matching rules for how duplicates are identified and set rules for what happens when a duplicate is found, such as allowing or preventing the user from saving the record. Alerts can be configured for Accounts (Organizations), Contacts, Leads, or custom objects and even across objects so that, for example, you could compare Leads with existing Contacts.

Note - As of February 2015 this new feature is not ready for use in the Nonprofit Starter Pack. For more information visit the Power of Us Hub NPSP group.

Lightning Process Builder - This new feature is an interactive editor which will allow you to create a multi-step process for creating or updating records, sending e-mail, or initiating custom programming. Prior to the Process Builder you would have to use Visual Workflow or programming to perform these same tasks. Processes are criteria-based meaning that a process will fire based on certain parameters you determine - which is similar to how workflow rules work. For example, if you want to perform a field update, post to Chatter, and send an e-mail automatically when someone closes a large donation, you could accomplish that with the Process Builder. Although, that's a fairly basic example. You could create a much more complex process involving multiple steps with true/false logic branches.

Better Mobile Support for Dashboards - You can now drill down to an underlying report from a dashboard element using Salesforce1 like you could already do on the desktop version. You can also run dashboards as another user to see their view of a dashboard via a mobile device. This is also functionality which has already been available on the desktop version of Salesforce.

Chatter Bundled Posts - Sequential changes to records are bundled together into a single post instead of each change generating its own post. This means that records which have many updates in succession will just generate a single summary post instead of several single posts. This should make Chatter feeds easier to scan with less clutter.

Salesforce Files - Desktop files can be synced as Salesforce files in Chatter so that changes you make to a synced file on your desktop will be pushed up to Salesforce. This behaviors works very much like Dropbox or Box.com in terms of syncing file versions between the cloud and your desktop computer.

Salesforce Release Cycle: Three times a year Salesforce releases updates to the base platform for all users of Salesforce. Releases results in automatic updates to your Salesforce instance. With each release, Salesforce publishes complete notes on every new feature or change to the platform.

Complete Spring '15 Release notes.

Watch the Spring '15 Release Highlights video: