Lightning Strikes, Be Ready

Salesforce will turn on Lightning Experience on a rolling basis starting with the Winter ‘20 release for all orgs with Supported Editions and User Licenses for Lightning Experience.

After the update, users will still have access to Salesforce Classic when Lightning Experience is turned on, however for a limited time. Currently, users may take advantage of the built-in lead time to get used to the formal change coming next year, by selecting the Turn on Lightning Experience update that appears under Critical Updates.

Utilize this action to verify your organization’s existing features and customizations in the new interface and to prepare your users via change management. Start now to ensure a better experience for everyone when Lightning Experience is turned on later. Every week, starting the Sunday after Lightning Experience is turned on, Lightning Experience-enabled users who are working in Salesforce Classic are automatically logged into Lightning Experience. Users can switch back to Salesforce Classic as needed, but again, for a limited time.


WHAT’S THE TIMELINE FOR THIS UPDATE?

Beginning in Winter ‘20, the update starts to auto-activates. See the auto-activation date listed under Critical Updates for your organization’s specific auto-activation date.

WHICH EDITIONS AND USERS ARE AFFECTED?

All users with the Lightning Experience User permission enabled are affected by this critical update. This includes all users with: (1) Standard profiles, which automatically include the Lightning Experience User permission by default and (2) Custom profiles or permission sets that have the Lightning Experience User permission included.

Set Up Users for Lightning Experience

HOW CAN YOU PREPARE FOR THE UPDATE?

Salesforce offers excellent transition tools that automate and speed up the process. The Lightning Experience Transition Assistant is a one-stop shop for all of the recommended steps and tools that you need; but of course, DaizyLogik is available to assist clients as well.LexNov2019TipsDaizyLogik has done several upgrades to Lightning now, and depending on the timing of the move and the level of customization in the Salesforce instance, the level of effort has been between do-it-yourself to “you need a developer”.

Salesforce has continually improved the automatic inventory of artifacts that need special attention during a Lightning conversion, also known as the Readiness Check. The Lightning Experience Migration Assistant has been replaced by the Lightning Experience Transition Assistant, your central hub for all of the recommended activities, tools, and resources for a successful transition. There are now Beta versions of tools to inventory and convert JavaScript buttons, Visualforce pages, and URL hacks.

Some of the artifacts can be converted automatically by Salesforce, but for those more complicated cases that the tools cannot convert, you will need a consultant and possibly a developer to build the equivalent button, link or page navigation in Lightning.

Specifically, we want to show how we leveraged the power of Lightning Components to solve some of the more complicated cases we ran across.

HomeKeeper – A Fieldset Container Lightning Component

Problem Description

DaizyLogik and Grounded Solutions Network were working on making the HomeKeeper app managed package Lightning compatible. The primary custom object in HomeKeeper has nearly 300 fields on its package page layout, a common design in Salesforce Classic for complex objects that allows users to view related fields of a record on one page via formula fields.

One limitation when using Lightning experience is that a maximum of 254 fields can be displayed on a page layout or Lightning page. For an object with more than 254 fields, not all fields can be added to a Lightning layout to be displayed all at once, which means an administrator needs to be selective as to which fields will be shown. Currently, the available workarounds are:

  • Use Salesforce Classic
  • Remove fields from the layout so fewer than 254 fields are displayed at one time
  • Find a Lightning component on the AppExchange that can display fields from an object and ‘break up’ the page in multiple parts. This particular workaround would not work in our case, because of the need to package such a component with the HomeKeeper App, which is not possible.

Building A Teacher Portal Using Salesforce Communities for ArtsCorps

ArtsCorpsArtsCorps works with a growing number of teaching artists and other teaching professionals who need to track and submit student attendance as well as payroll information.They had designed a functional solution, but after a number of years, the team realized that it was not a solution that could scale to accommodate the need for a growing number of teaching artists to submit attendance tracking data, timesheets, and expenses.

The ArtsCorps team reached out to DaizyLogik to propose alternative solutions that would allow teaching artists to manage and enter attendance for their classes, timesheets, and expense information through a self-serve online portal. After exploring several options, DaizyLogik recommended using Salesforce Customer Communities to build the teacher portal that would put the ability to manage class information, student attendance, and payroll information in the hands of teachers.

Read more about how this customized solution helped ArtsCorps by designing a simple, self-serve system to support their team.

Partnership, Agility, Documentation: Keys to a Long Term Solution

Beginning in early 2017, DaizyLogik partnered with Saasinct to help the Fund for Global Human Rights make a significant upgrade to their technology toolkit, including a move to Salesforce Lightning and migrating from Salsa to Engaging Networks to manage donations and email marketing, which required both meticulous data quality management and the development of a new bi-directional sync with Salesforce.

Multiple teams, requirements that evolved as we dug deeper and learned together, and a client whose priorities changed over time as they responded to rapid changes in their field and the world at large. These are everyday realities for most technology solution scenarios in today’s complex world. We found that combining the Agile Method, transparent project management that kept the client in the driver’s seat, light documentation targeted to future users, and a truly collaborative partnership in which each party could speak freely and respectfully push the others’ boundaries was a recipe for success.
Read the case study here.

Addressing Salesforce CRM Storage Limitations – A Document-Oriented Database Inspired Approach

Most organizations start out with 1GB of storage for Salesforce CRM. This can be a challenge especially for nonprofits who would like to collect a lot of data needed to report to their funders,  collect program data or consolidate multiple aspects of their business data into Salesforce. Over time the data fills up the allotted storage and puts organizations into a bind to either purge data or purchase more storage.

Over the years we have explored different solutions that can be used as preventive measures and limit the storage used. The traditional approach is to either export and archive or aggregate and purge older records. The drawback with these solutions is that you can no longer see the details of the historical data in Salesforce.

Below we describe a different preventive approach inspired from document-oriented databases that allows organizations to keep their data and not run the risk of running out of storage.

One Report, Many Dashboard Components

Do you have a favorite Salesforce report that provides you a wealth of data that you would like to represent visually? If your report is pulling together multiple sums and groupings, then one graphical representation will not be possible or desirable. But with a Dashboard in Salesforce Lightning, you can leverage the same report to show many aspects of your data in one place.

We used two of our favorite reports “New Donors Last Year” and “Second Year Donors”. These reports pull the list of gifts made last year by new and returning donors, grouped by donation Record Type and by donor, and count the number of donors as well as the number of donations.

We then used the two reports to create a rich Lightning Dashboard that visually displays various aspects of the data.

LightningDashboardBlog

Each of the two reports was reused multiple times to extract and display different aspects of the data using the right visual representation in dashboard components. The New Donors Last Year is used to display the four dashboard components in the top row, while the Second Year Donors report was used to create the four components in the bottom row.

When adding a new Dashboard component in Lightning you can select the report you wish to use, the visual representation and the actual slice of data from the report. LightningDashboardComponent2

By reusing the same report for multiple components you can avoid the proliferation of multiple versions of the same report, and you can easily call out various aspects of the data by visually representing them in a dashboard.

Ready For Lightning? Consider This.

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.