Play by Play: Evaluating Lightning Migration for Your Salesforce Org

Course Overview
Welcome to this Salesforce Play by Play with Pluralsight. Salesforce Play by Play is an interactive series where we sit down with Salesforce experts such as MVPs, consultants, developers, and architects to discuss common challenges faced every day by Salesforce customers. We'll be learning while discussing concepts and debating tradeoffs on various approaches to solving real-world problems. We learn by reviewing system configurations or writing code, and then exploring the benefits of any particular solution. In this course, we challenge Adam Olshansky, Salesforce MVP and developer at Google, to help us build a migration strategy for a move from Salesforce Classic to the Lightning Experience. First, Adam clarifies exactly what the Lightning Experience is, and why Salesforce is so focused on it. He makes the case for why customers should seriously consider moving their orgs from Classic to Lightning, and introduces some simple out-of-the-box tools provided by Salesforce to help evaluate the potential effort, as well as help ensure that they'll be taking advantage of all the new functionality Lightning has to offer. You'll watch as he walks through the Lightning Readiness report and demonstrates many of the more powerful new features available to Salesforce customers that exist only in Lightning, and not in Classic. Along the way, we explore the new Kanban view, paths, the favorites feature, new navigation features, and the new Lightning Report Builder and dashboards. You'll see him walk through the new Setup menu and Object Manager. He'll migrate a Classic app to Lightning, and you'll get a quick overview of the Lightning App Builder and Lightning components. We'll also review why as a developer migrating to Lightning will help expand your web development programming skills to make you more marketable to potential employers. By the time we're done, you'll have gained some great perspective on just why you may want to begin that migration sooner rather than later, as well as some considerations that you may want to seriously analyze for possible impact to your users before jumping in without a clear migration strategy. So, please join us for Evaluating Lightning Migration for your Salesforce Org. We hope you enjoy it.

Determining Lightning Readiness
We know we need to do this. Where do you begin? What would be the first step in the process? So, basically, as you know, it's not something that should be taken lightly, we talked about that a little bit, and fortunately Salesforce has this process that kind of gives you an initial pass at maybe how ready are you in the form of the Lightning Readiness Report, and so we can walk through that in a second here. Basically, it walks you through what in your org is ready to go to Lightning right now, which sets of users, which sets of features, things like that, and kind of talking back to that spring cleaning thing we were discussing, it also tells you what maybe isn't going to work in Lightning, but also what isn't being used anywhere, what's just old functionality you can get rid of right away. So this is a tool? You push a button and it goes out and it does the assessment for you, and then it generates a report for you to review? Exactly, yeah, it scans the whole org, walks through different things, and kind of gives you that feedback report of everything you need to know to start thinking about migrating over to Lightning.

Lightning Experience User Features
Let's walk through some things that users can do right off the bat. So one thing is on pretty much any object, I think, now, there's a new way to look at your objects. So I'm going to look at my Opportunities, and this is kind of the Classic list view, I can see all my opportunities at once, but now in Lightning there's a new way to look at it and that's the Kanban view. And as you can see, that's going to look a little bit different. It gives me a nice new display to see all my opportunities, and the really cool thing about this, going back to that wanting to be able to update without a bunch of button presses, I can go take this Grand Hotels opportunity, drag it over here, and now it's been updated, and my totals, you saw, automatically updated accordingly, and so that's a real-time update of this. So you could think about maybe I'm in some sort of meeting, or I'm going through all my opportunities, making sure they're all updated with a group, you know, we can call them out, we can update them, and in real-time see all of our totals. Very nice. And the field that the Kanban columns are reflecting, that is the stage of the opportunity? So in this case for opportunity it's stage, but if you're setting a Kanban list view you can basically choose which pick list. you can change what the pick list is. Exactly. So you may have a custom process that has a custom pick list, you can potentially use that. And you can identify what field it is that's aggregating as well. So basically you can customize this very nicely to any of your other pick lists, as well as what the aggregation is, and you still get that nice drag-and-drop functionality. Definitely.

Lightning Experience Builder Features
So let's go into the Setup menu, where admins and developers like to be. And first thing we'll notice is that things are moved around a little bit. So there is a little bit of an adjustment curve getting used to this, but as in Classic we have our search bar ready to help us out. One big thing I want to talk about is one of my biggest pain points in Classic is that when I'm looking at my standard and my custom objects they're completely separate. You know, my Standard is under customize and then the object name and all that stuff, and my custom objects are all hidden under this customized objects, whatever it's called, and then I have to go search for it, a bunch of different clicks, they look very different, very separate experiences. One of the things Lightning Experience has done is kind of bring those experiences into a unified system, and that's in the form of the Object Manager. And the Object Manager tab, unlike in Classic where I had to go search for it every time, it's always kind of front and center on the top here. And so I can see my standard account is in here, you know, Details, Fields & Relationships, Record Types, things like that. I also have my Manage Package Objects, and on the bottom here I have my custom objects in the same window. And, again, the same layout, Details, Fields & Relationships, Record Types, all there, all looking the same, because at the end of the day as part of my business processes, I don't really care if it's a standard or custom objects, I want to think about my objects as part of my business process. And this is really nice, it uses the same user interface pattern whether it's a standard object or a custom object. And also what I notice the difference is it's not now, you used to have that one long object page for custom objects, and now we've got got this nice tab-based navigation mechanism. Exactly, and we can, there's a search bar built in here without having to do the extra clicks of Ctrl+F, things like that, to find the object that I was looking for, so that's definitely helpful as well.