SALESFORCE LIGHTNING HAS STRUCK

Why We’re Excited and What Salesforce Customers Should Know

Today Salesforce.com reached a significant milestone in their product line with the announcement of the greatly anticipated “Salesforce Lightning,” which delivers a brand new user interface and experience to their highly sophisticated platform and infrastructure. While the underlying technology of Salesforce Products has matured beautifully over the years, the user interface and design have significantly lagged behind, which is why this announcement is a complete game changer for the entire Salesforce ecosystem. We are proud to partner with this amazing company, and we loved reading about the Lightning journey for Mike Rosenbaum (EVP, Sales Cloud at Salesforce) and his team at Salesforce!

While we’re excited about the new UI and improved design features, we also recognize the significance of this shift for existing Salesforce customers. By no means will Salesforce Lightning be a simple switch that we flip and everyone will just go about their business as usual; instead, it will require a gradual and strategic approach ensuring that all of our existing Salesforce environments – as well as our users – are adequately prepared and ready for the transition.

So what do Salesforce customers and administrators need to know?

• In addition to hearing references to “Lightning,” you’ll also likely hear the term “Aloha”, which references the ‘old’ Salesforce UI (i.e. the only UI we’ve ever known to date!)

• This Trailhead module will help you determine whether Lightning is right for you and your organization – definitely worth checking out.

• The Lightning debut will be released in October with the Winter ‘16 product release. These are the important dates to keep in mind for this release, including Sandbox cutoff/refresh dates (refresh is Sept. 11) and the final release windows.

• With the Winter’ 16 release:
  • Lightning will only be available to Sales Cloud users. Other clouds (Service, Platform, etc) will remain in the Aloha interface until a later release date (TBD). If you are an administrator and you enable Lightning for your profile, you’ll see the change within your Sales Cloud functionality, but the setup and administration menu will remain in the Aloha interface until a later release.
  • Lightning will not be automatically enabled; instead, administrators will have the opportunity to enable Lightning at the user, profile, and/or organization levels.

• It will be important to take a thoughtful, strategic approach to how and when you deploy Lightning to your users. Start with a “Pilot” group of just a few people, ask for constant feedback, and expand your deployment from there.

• You may register for Lightning pre-release orgs now (something we definitely recommend) which will give you an idea of the look and feel of the new Lightning experience.

• Visualforce will be supported in Salesforce Lightning – in fact, not too much should change with Visualforce as it looks like VF will just sit on top of the Lightning framework. Click here for Visualforce/Lightning design considerations.

• Learn Lightning with the Trailhead Path for Admins and super users! We highly recommend for all admins! https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/trail/lex_admin_migration

We are absolutely PUMPED about Salesforce Lightning and the awesome experience it will ultimately deliver to our clients, partners, as well as our own internal staff. Our sleeves are rolled up and we are diving deep into pre-release orgs to understand what is possible, test new solutions, and develop best practices for Salesforce customers who want to make the switch from Aloha to Lightning. We’ll plan to share the lessons we learn throughout our journey, and we look forward to hearing from our partners and clients about their experience as well!

Cheers and happy Lightning Day!