Back to all stories

You’ve no doubt already heard about the new Salesforce Lightning Experience. Touted as Salesforce’s new vision for CRM, the platform is making headlines around the world for its unparalleled intuitive design, modern user interface and extensibility. It represents a major update to Salesforce Classic, and marks the beginning of a transformative period for Salesforce Users and Admins.

If you are a Salesforce Admin for an organisation, large or small, you should start thinking about how you will manage the transition from Salesforce Classic to Lightning. With the new platform becoming available with Sales Cloud as part of the Winter ’16 release – for all existing customers across all editions – we’re on the countdown to change.

What is Salesforce Lightning?

Essentially, it’s a brand-new platform designed to maximise sales rep productivity, with usability and productivity enhancements, rich analytics and in-line intelligence. The new platform is comprised of three offerings including:

1. Lightning Experience – this is an entirely new multi-device application experience for Salesforce users, coming first to Sales Cloud. It is modern and intuitive, providing a consistent experience across any device (ie: mobile, wearable and desktop).

2. Salesforce Lightning Design System – this new ‘design point of view’ is a set of guidelines, best practices and reusable code that you can leverage to build modern and beautiful apps on the Salesforce platform.

3. Lightning App Builder and Components – introduced in 2014, these components make it easy to visually assemble apps with drag-and-drop ease. Lightning components can be created by your own developers, or can be leveraged using pre- built components built by Salesforce and our partners.

Together, the three offerings enable you to easily create modern enterprise apps; and deliver a more intelligent experience that helps you and your end users to work faster and smarter.

How do you switch from Classic to Lightning?

As an Admin, you have no doubt invested time setting up your Salesforce Classic applications and helping users across the organisation get the most from it. The thought of changing all users across to an entirely new platform can be daunting. It doesn’t have to be.

To help you manage end user adoption and ensure least disruption to your organisation, you’ve got a few options when it comes to rolling out the new Salesforce Lightning

Experience

Salesforce Classic is still here, and we’ve made it easy for Lightning Experience users to move between the old and the new. So if Lightning Experience isn’t a perfect fit yet, you and your users can try it on for size without losing out. When users are first enabled for Lightning Experience, the new interface is the default – and, ideally, they will find that the new interface meets all of their needs. But if there’s an important feature or tool back in the classic interface, they can switch to Salesforce Classic at any time, without assistance from you.

What happens to existing custom Visualforce pages?

While Lightning Experience is an all-new user interface, it doesn’t mean your Visualforce pages stop working. This release includes beta support for Visualforce in Lightning

Experience, which means your existing Visualforce pages will work – many without needing any revisions.

Yet, because things have moved around in the new interface, there are some chores you’ll need to complete to make sure your Visualforce pages work the way you expect. Plus, there are a few Visualforce features that don’t yet work in Lightning Experience. Here are a few basic details to consider:

  • If your Visualforce pages use JavaScript, there are things you need to check.

Visualforce doesn’t ‘own’ the whole page when shown in Lightning Experience, and because of that your JavaScript code needs to play by some new rules.

  • If your Visualforce pages use the built-in standard components, their look-and-feel matches Salesforce Classic, whether users access them in the new or old interface.

There’s some work to do if you want your pages to match the Lightning Experience styling.

To help with this effort, we’re publishing the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS), a collection of design patterns, components, and guidelines for creating interfaces that fit in with Lightning Experience. The SLDS is available today as a public beta.

Want to know more?

There are a number of things that you should start to look at now:

  • Salesforce Winter ’16 Release Notes
  • Trailhead – this is the fun and free way to learn Salesforce. You earn points and badges through interactive, hands-on developer and admin training courses. The
  • Admin Trail - Migrating to Lightning Experience module is useful HERE.