As part of our Winter ’13 release, we’re excited to unveil the Salesforce for Outlook Side Panel. We listened to your feedback on the IdeaExchange, so we created this side panel to give you more control of Salesforce tasks directly in Microsoft^® Outlook^®.

With the side panel, you can add an email in one click to Salesforce—for example, to a contact, account, opportunity, or lead. When you select an email in Outlook, the side panel displays up to four Salesforce contacts and leads from the From, To, and CC fields. You have the option to add the email to either one contact and one account or opportunity, or one lead only.

To add an email to a Salesforce record, click Add Email next to a contact, account, opportunity, or lead. This adds the email to your Salesforce records without sending the email to My Unresolved Items, so you can spend less time managing your unresolved items.

But what if the side panel doesn’t automatically display the record you want to add the email to? Just use the search feature to find additional records for contacts, accounts, opportunities and leads. You can then add the email to any of the records that appear in your search results.

We’re excited about the features in the Salesforce for Outlook Side Panel. But we’re not finished! In future releases, we plan to let you add emails to any type of record. We also plan to let you associate other Outlook records in the side panel, such as Outlook events. Keep in mind, our Safe Harbor Statement applies to any forward-looking claims we make about future releases.

We hope you enjoy the side panel! Let us know what you’d like to see in the next release. For details about new features for Salesforce for Outlook, see the Salesforce Winter ’13 Release Notes.