So, what's new in the Service Cloud 2?

Well, a lot of things are new, but I thought the big ones  are the Real Time Quoting, Salesforce for Outlook, and especially the new Report Builder.  Let's not forget Chatter which I'll touch on later.

Salesforce released in Winter '09 the Real Time Quoting functionality that allows organizations to build a quote from an opportunity, print as a PDF and send along with other packaged content to the customer via email.  Very nice feature and will definately have a net positive impact with many customers out there!  This was a significant step forward for sure.

The new Salesforce for Outlook is going to make a lot of folks real happy as it solves some of the old problems with the Outlook client integration.

My favorite new features (beside's Chatter) has to be the Report Builder enhancements.  Coming in one of the next releases is a new capability to design reports using real data pulled directly from the objects so you see in real time as you build the report what it's going to look like.

I have to also mention that the new scheduling tools are going to enhance reporting as well.  I've run into a few instances with reporting where the report engine just couldn't pull the numbers the way they needed to be pulled in real time.  Another approach that's now possible with the scheduling tools is to run agregations into a custom reporting object and then reporting off this object.  While it's not "real-time" data, it certainly solves some of the nastiest problems with the existing reporting engine and opens up a whole new realm of possibilities.