Things to know about the Salesforce Lightning switch

If you are an avid Salesforce user, I am sure by now you have heard about the upcoming mandatory switch from Salesforce Classic to Lightning. In this blog series, the Tackle team addresses some of those looming questions you might have about this important change.

Jeff Miller, our Salesforce expert, weighs in on some of the changes in Salesforce Lightning vs. Classic. Check out what he has to say about the switch.

 

PART ONE

What is different from Salesforce Classic?

The user interface is significantly updated, making it substantially more flexible and modern, and much more customizable to an organization’s specific business needs and processes.

The look and feel of Reports and Dashboards changes quite a bit with Lightning, as does the design/editing process, though much of the underlying functionality carries over from Classic (including many familiar quirks and limitations).

In addition, most new Salesforce and 3rd Party App features are built with the Lightning interface in mind. Lightning also comes with some new architecture that will allow Salesforce to build new features that Classic couldn’t support.

Why do you have to switch?

While Salesforce is not outright retiring Classic at this time, it is in the process of phasing it out. With the Winter 2019 release scheduled for January 1, 2020, all organizations using Salesforce will be automatically switched over to Lightning Experience by default. Organizations and users will still be able to switch back to Classic for the time being, but its days are clearly numbered.

We recommend converting to Lightning before this automatic switch to minimize disruption for your team and to help create a smooth transition to this new user interface.

How will it help your organization?

Aside from the logistics, we find Lightning to be an improvement in workflow for users: namely somewhat fewer clicks to do the same tasks.

Maximizing your organization’s experience transitioning to the new UI (as well as leveraging everything it has to offer) benefits greatly from advanced planning of app and page layouts, as well as advance testing of critical reports and business processes in Lightning.

Even out of the box, the Lightning interface feels more modern and efficient. But with a little tweaking to better accommodate how your team will actually use the system, you can pretty easily go from having users who “reluctantly learn a new interface to do their job among the dozens of other things they’ve got going on” to those who are excited because their job just got a bit easier.

In Summary

The new user interface is an evolution, not a complete re-thinking. Users for the most part will not have a hard time adapting, as long as their apps and page layouts are updated prior.