Check out another great community resource for certification: http://www.forceprepare.com/.  Looks like the materials are primarily for Developer and Administrator certs.

Cheers,

John

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion surround the maintenance fees for certified professionals.  I was having a hard time understanding the fee schedule myself, so I asked for clarification.  Here’s what I learned:

You will be charged $100 per year per certification track you maintain.  Maintenance fees start one year (or 3 releases) after your first achieved certification within that track.  There are 2 tracks:

Administrator (entails Administrator, Advanced Administrator, and Consultant)

Developer (entails Developer, Advanced Developer)

In short, the maximum amount you will be charged per year is $200 for certification maintenance, although each track may be billed at different periods.

Hope this clarifies for those with any remaining questions.  Cheers,

John

With this release, Salesforce certified folk are only required to complete training.  No exam required! 

I believe this training is open to the public.  I was able to access it through this link, while logging in through one of my uncertified accounts. 

The Sales Cloud

Analytic Enhancements

• Charts
  • Greater control over labels and colors
  • Donut and Funnel chart types added
  • Not automatically enabled.  When enabled, you cannot return to the old charting engine.
• Dashboards
  • Brighter colors and additional colors added
  • Display actual amounts and percentages on graphs
    
• Analytic Snapshots
  • Can now be bundled in managed and unmanaged packages
  • Schedule and running user cannot be packaged and must be configured after package installation

Automated Campaigns

• Campaign Member
  • View/edit/delete/clone each record
  • Custom fields and page layout editor now available for campaign members (e.g. RSVP status, Food preference, etc.)
  • Workflow rules for campaign members (e.g. if RVSP “Yes” send email alert with agenda)
  • Use triggers for additional customization
  • Setup –> Customize –> Campaigns –> Campaign Members

List Views for Account and Sales Teams

• My Sales Teams is now a filter criteria for list views on accounts and opportunities (account teams must be enabled)
  
  

Recurring Tasks

• Can edit individual tasks, or the series
• Must have an end date
  • Provided button to calculate max end date (based upon number of tasks created)
• Recurrence icon on recurring tasks
  
• Turned on by default (but can be turned off)
• Outlook sync not supported for recurring tasks (planned for a future released)

Admin Enhancements

• Platform (Force.com Edition) profiles can now be given 10 existing CRM administrator permissions
• Delegated data administration now possible (View All and Modify All per object) on platform profiles
• Profile Setup Audit Trail logs changes to a profile, change author, and time of change
• When cloning a profile, Login Hours and Login IP Ranges are now cloned as well

Content Enhancements

• Content delivery now includes option for password protecting content
• Administrator can set default password (org wide) for content delivery
• Reporting for featured content and ratings
• Creation of content packs and the presentation assembly can now be disabled (org wide)

Mobile Enhancements

• Blackberry
  • Related list now on the detail page of a record
  • Clone existing records
  • Create links from Salesforce records to visualforce pages or web tabs
  • Improved Storm support
• iPhone
  • List view enhancements
  • Lead conversion support
  • Calendar style browser for events
  • Products and price book support

Sharing UI Enhancements

• Sharing administrator pages load faster
• Customized list views

The Service Cloud

Salesforce to Salesforce Cases and Case Comments

• Share records from one organization to another (Salesforce to Salesforce)
  • Supports cases, leads, opportunities, accounts, contacts, activities, products, opportunity products, and custom objects
• Near real time updates
• Includes reporting and workflow capabilities
• Records can be shared manually or through sharing rules

Advanced Customer Portal User Management

• Ability to disable customer and partner users (new buttons on contact record)
• Ability to disable and an entire account’s access to customer and partner portals (new buttons on account record)
• Portal users can now be transferred between accounts (will take on role of new account or create a role will be created if none exists)
• Portal users can now be merged

Advanced Case Workflow

• Workflow rules can now be created when comments are added to cases
  (notice that case is now selectable when creating a workflow rule on case comment)
  

The Custom Cloud

Force.com Sites

• Publish VisualForce pages to branded domains entirely through the force.com platform.
• Sites is now live!

Organization-Wide Email Addresses

• Generic from email address and name
• Specify which profiles can send from each org wide address
• When sending an email, users select the email from the “from” address
  • Can only be used when sending a single email (no mass email support, no workflow rules support!)
  • Email address must be verified (activation link sent to address)

Workflow Process Visualizer

• Graphical representation of approval process (BETA)
• Read only representation

Visualforce Enhancements

• Ability to add visualforce page as a dashboard component
  • Will display information based on the user logged in, not the running user
• Ability to use visualforce pages as custom help
  (when users click this link) 
  

Declarativ
e App Builder Enhancements

• TEXT() function support for picklists in formulas and workflow field updates
• INCLUDES(), ISNULL(), PRIORVALUE(), and ISCHANGED() support for multi-select picklists
• Support for encoding functions in formuals: HTMLENCODE, JSENCODE, JSINHTMLCODE, URLCODE
• Managed package versioning and deprecation support

I am a few weeks months release behind on this post.  It is amazing how much this platform changes, even just one release later.  These notes are not completely comprehensive.  Make sure to check out:

Spring 09 Release Page

Spring 09 Release Notes

Spring 09 Release Training

More coming on Summer 09 shortly.

User Productivity

Opportunity Genius

• To enable (administrator perspective)
  • Customize –> Opportunities –> Similar Opportunities
  • Select 3-10 fields (only on the opportunity object) to search for similar opportunities
  • Add similar opportunities to the related list on the appropriate page layout(s)
• To search (user perspective)
  • Open an opportunity and find the Similar Opportunities related list.  Click Find.
    • Note: similar opportunities are not populated automatically.  Opportunities must be found and bookmarked to appear in the related list.
  • Select relevant opportunities (presented in order of relevancy based upon search criteria) and click bookmark.  They will now appear in the Similar Opportunities Related list only on that opportunity (if you pull up opportunity A and mark B as similar, opportunity B will not list opportunity A as similar).

Enhanced Search

• Enabled by default
• Document contents in Salesforce will be indexed
  • Searching to find a document will search the entire contents of all documents
  • Supported doc types:

    PDF
    .pdf
    PPT
    .pot, .pps, .ppt
    RTF
    .rtf
    Text
    .c, .cpp, .css, .csv, .ini, .java, .log, .sql, .txt
    Word
    .doc, .dot
    XLS
    .xls, .xlt
    XML
    .xml

  • Documents are indexed and made searchable immediately upon upload
  • Note:  Microsoft Office 2007 native documents (.docx, .xlsx, etc) are not supported

Time Picker for Events

• When adjusting times on an event, menus are now drop down instead of a manual entry

Collaboration Tools

Salesforce Content

• Presentation assembly
  • Create presentations easily by dragging slides from various presentations into new deck, live in Salesforce Content
• Content Packs
  • Create and easily distribute a group or related documents (e.g. send a prospect a manufacturing content pack that has a few general docs and a few specific to manufacturing)
• Personal Workspace
  • Store documents in the cloud with versioning control
• Content Delivery
  • Capabilities
    • Share documents or content packs with clients/prospects
    • Determine which clients/prospects have viewed/downloaded content & notify on first read
    • Option to allow file download only as PPT or PDF
    • Set content expiration
    • Send link to client
  • Notes
    • Limits on page views and bandwidth consumption are org-wide
    • Non-content users can only convert 1 file at a time into a URL
    • Content users can convert multiple files at a time into a content pack
    • Irregular fonts or shapes may not be represented correctly
    • Animations and other slide effects will not be present in preview

Salesforce Ideas

• When a user submits an idea, Salesforce post similar ideas below
  
  • Automatically enabled for all orgs (not a setting, no way to disable)

Salesforce to Salesforce

• Share same record with multiple companies
• Share products and opportunity products with partners
• Share formula fields
• Create pre-defined templates organized by partner type
• Share records through API including data loader, excel connector

PRM

• Allow partners to manage customer cases through the partner portal
• Allow partners to send email from the partner portal

Customer Portal

• Customer Administration
  • Delegate customer to have access to create new portal users, edit existing users, reset passwords, and deactivate customer users for their associated account
  • No built-in limit on number of portal users an account can consume (limit can be implemented with an apex trigger)
• Customer Portal Super User
  • Delegate customer to have ability to view/edit all cases and contacts associated with their account

Business Process

Enhanced Page Layout Editor

• Switch page layouts from within editor
  
• WYSIWYG editor
• Search function for related lists and other page elements
• Can now add blank space to page layout
• Change tab order per section
• Org-wide setting, enabled by default

Email to Case as a Service

• Does not require use of an email client behind the firewall
• 10MB mail size limit
• Steps to configure:
  • Enable email to case
  • Set up routing address(es)
  • Verify address(es)
  • Setup forwarding from email address to Salesforce address (do not use an auto-forwarding rule)
    Example using an AD user to an AD contact.  There may be a better way to accomplish this; I am far from an AD expert:
    

Campaign Enhancements

• Campaign members related list – can now view/edit/add on one page and two subpages
  

Global Business Hours for Holidays

• Associate ho
  liday to multiple business hours
• Holidays are automatically adjusted for appropriate time zone
• One date range for per holiday record (7/4/08 and 7/4/09 are two records; use the clone button to speed the process up)

Delegated Administration

• Ability to grant “View all” or “Modify all” per object to profile
   
  • Overrides sharing rules and role hierarchy
  • The Modify All permission on an object is currently the only way to provide transfer/delete permissions to records owned by those equal/higher in the role hierarchy (excluding leads)
• Modify all permission also grants mass transfer and mass deletion of records if “View Setup and Configuration” is enabled for the profile
• Not available for customer/partner profiles

Describe the Client Management feature

The “Client Management feature” refers to the use of Person Accounts.  A person account is used primarily in Business to Consumer (B2C) applications.  Essentially it blends the functionality of both an account and a contact into a separate record type on the account object called a “Person Account”.

As record types are involved, this is an Enterprise+ feature.  It is free, but is enabled by request only.

See “What is a Person Account?” and “Person Account Behaviors” for more details.

Describe the Territory Management feature

Territory management gives you the ability to structure your sales organization and grant access based on industry, state, or any other (including custom) field.  In addition, multiple forecasts can be created per user per territory.

Example:

Take the screen below.  A sales rep may need to forecast into both the (US Region) “East” territory and the (Industry) “Consumer” territory.

(Graphic from Salesforce.com)

Prerequisites:

• Enterprise+ Edition only.
• Customizable forecasting must be enabled for the org.
• Territory management is free, but available by request only.

This is an oversimplified explanation of territory management.  At a minimum, I suggest reading “What is Territory Management”, and “Territory Management FAQ”.

Describe Advanced Currency Management

Advanced currency management is capable of converting currencies with dated exchange rates, providing an accurate and simple way to report across multiple currencies and regions while accounting for fluctuations in exchange rates.  For instance:

Only certain fields and objects are impacted by Advanced Currency management.  For those impacted, the applicable date field would determine which exchange rate is used (e.g. Close Date determines which rate is used for Amount on an Opportunity).  For those fields not impacted (e.g. cross-object formulas), the static exchange rate is used.

To enable Advanced Currency Management:

• Multiple currencies must be enabled first (available by request only)
• Enable the option for Advanced Currency Management (Company Profile –> Manage Currencies)
• Group+ Edition

See “About Advanced Currency Management” for additional information.