Ready For Lightning? Consider This. - DaizyLogik

Fresh from the Salesforce Global Lightning Tour 2017

Our consultants attended the Salesforce Lightning Tour ’17 workshop this week and are very excited about some of the latest features in Lightning. They’re pretty awesome.

Whether you’re already using Lightning or are considering moving to Lightning, we wanted to share some of the newest highlights.

What is Lightning? Lightning is a completely redesigned experience. It’s a framework and an extension of the Salesforce platform, and a community of ISVs (independent software vendors) who have built components to make it work really well. It is designed specifically to increase productivity.

What does this mean for the end user? Lightning is action oriented and provides a less cluttered user experience, powered with an intelligent and predictive search. It is completely component driven, which allows for a greater level of customization.

Upcoming Lightning Highlights:

Be able to display the Account Hierarchy using a Hierarchy component.
List views in Lightning will support the display of charts so you don’t necessarily need to create a report to view a chart.
List views can be displayed in a Kanban view for a more intuitive way of viewing the data.
You’ll be able to favor items and they will show up in your Favorites list and in the Tab drop down lists.
Search is enhanced with a lot more intelligence. For example, you can filter the search to only one object and you won’t need to go to a search results page.
Improved related list navigation is coming and our favorite: related lists will be just like real lists which means they will support filtered related lists. (Woohoo!)

Here are more gems coming up in future releases that might convince you that it is time to switch to Lightning if you haven’t already.

Spring ‘17

Account Hierarchy – users will be able to customize the columns that show up in the view.
Find and Merge Duplicate Accounts and Contacts – Duplicate management can be customized, no need to click a button to identify duplicates. When you look at a record you can see the duplicates. Salesforce is working on providing support for duplicate identification for custom objects and Opportunities.
Contacts to Multiple Accounts – This feature allows you to have a single Contact record linked to multiple Accounts in the standard version of Salesforce. This will become the new default for new customers. Support for Record Types on the Contact to Account relationship will be available and it will be possible to have custom fields on the relationship.
Sales Path – Users will be able to create a Sales Path on any custom object (using a Kanban view).
Most of the Campaigns gaps between Classic and Lightning have now been closed – Everything you could do in Classic you will be able to do in Lightning.
Ability to view Converted Leads
Email – You’ll be able to Email from any object that supports activities.
Lightning for Outlook & Lightning Sync

Summer ‘17

Email Template Support
Ability to create a new record from a related list
Opportunity Stage History
Opportunity Splits
Ability to use Email templates from Classic
Mass Email (is on the future road map) and Email tracking
Calendar scheduling for Office 365 (ability to integrate the calendar in Office 365)

Lightning Migration Framework:

If you’re considering a move to Lightning, we recommend that you develop a plan that is tailored to your specific organization. Here is our suggested migration framework:

Learn

Use some of the recommended Trailheads: Get Started with Lightning Experience, Migrate to Lightning Experience, Develop for Lightning Experience, and Lightning Superbadge.
Use the Success Community – join the Lightning Now community!
Salesforce University – train your end users for the new experience.

Evaluate

Perform a Business and Technical Analysis: Review Business Processes and re-imagine your business processes in Lightning to identify places where complexity will be reduced.
Identify an executive sponsor and main stakeholders.
Identify a pilot use case and early adopters.
Perform an Org Readiness check (Using the SF built-in tool).
Schedule a Lightning Readiness Consultation with SF experts.
Run the Salesforce Optimizer for some additional insights.

Rollout

We recommend the Lightning Experience Rollout Trailhead (This track will contain a full project plan that you can use to guide your roll out).
Roll out Lightning considering the pros and cons of an Organization based roll out vs Persona based roll out.
Prepare your Visualforce pages for Lightning.
Use Lightning alternatives for your custom Javascript Buttons.

Launch

Take advantage of Lightning only features (Path, Kanban, Favorites, Utility Bar)
Avoid technical debt – Start using new features right away instead of reverting to old habits like Javascript buttons. Install only Lightning-ready AppExchange apps and use Files not Notes and Attachments.

Measure and Optimize

Make use of the out-of-the-box Lightning Adoption Reports and Dashboards to view and measure user adoption of Lightning.
Develop workarounds or shortcuts for your users.
Expand usage by engaging your users via lunch and learn, webinars, tips and tricks.
Regularly check the Lightning Roadmap.