How to prepare your Salesforce Org for Lightning Experience

Since announcing the development of a new Lightning Experience in late 2015, Salesforce has gradually enabled features and functions available in the new UI.

Lightning Experience is a modern user interface that helps your sales reps make sense of their data easier and can help overall productivity for all users. Lightning Experience includes many new features and entirely redesigned pages, but not every Salesforce feature is supported in Lightning Experience. Switching to the new “Lightning” interface from “Classic” is still optional, and the users you enable for Lightning Experience can freely switch between the two.

As a Salesforce admin for your company, you will need to determine if and when your organization is ready for Lightning. The more features you have customized in your org, the greater the likelihood that moving to the Lightning interface will not be as simple as the flip of the switch. Still, it can be a valuable exercise to invest in changes that enable your team to use the new interface.

Salesforce has made great strides in helping their users move to Lightning. The steps below outline what you need to do to get your org Lightning ready.

Step 1 – Analyze Your Org

In Classic, go to the “Setup” section of Salesforce. On the main homepage of your Setup, you will see a “Lightning Experience Migration Assistant” call-to-action button labeled “Get Started.” From here, you can learn all about the Lightning interface and perform a scan of your org to understand your readiness as it relates to your unique implementation.

The readiness assessment is the first step you should take in evaluating potential customizations that could conflict with Lightning. The assessment reviews all your Objects, Custom Fields, Buttons, Visualforce pages, and more. Once the assessment is completed, you will have a full report of all potential conflicts that would need to be addressed with Lightning.

For example, the report will identify Buttons, which are not compatible in Lightning since they were replaced by a dropdown functionality within the actions for a given record. Javascript also doesn’t transfer over.

Keep in mind that you can rely on the assessment for determining the necessary changes in Sales Cloud, but for organizations that rely heavily on third-party apps, you will need to check with those vendors to understand Lightning readiness.

Step 2 – Talk with Your Stakeholders

Taking the first steps towards Lightning readiness is a great time to review how you’re using Salesforce features. There may be customizations or applications that you aren’t using anymore. There may also be applications that aren’t compatible with Lightning but can be archived.

When considering how you’re using Salesforce, it’s a good idea to interview key stakeholders involved in Salesforce to understand adoption issues and ideas on how you could be getting more value.

• What are some of the new features in Lightning that appeal to users?
• What features are you using in Classic that aren’t available in Lightning, and can we archive those?
• How are you using automation, including workflows and triggers?
• What other ways can we help you get better reports or improve productivity?

If you have had to change Salesforce administrators, developers, or partners, it’s important to review processes and scenarios where underlying configurations might surface. If documentation was not related to customizations, it will be more time-consuming to unravel existing or old automation.

Step 3 – Consider your Salesforce Roadmap

Is your org a wild west? Are you struggling with database cleanliness and government, or adoption issues? Does your executive team get the reports they need to make effective decisions?

Many organizations are choosing to make additional improvements as they move to Lightning. For long-time users, it’s a great time to re-evaluate your roadmap with Salesforce and to consider if there are additional products you can add; integrations that would improve reporting; leads that are falling through the cracks, and more.

If your assessment came back with items that require adjustment, this is a good time to reflect on the overall strategy for those and other features. It’s possible there are newer options or AppExchange apps that may provide more out-of-the-box functionality and maintenance.

Step 4 – Review the Product Roadmap

If the current version of Lightning doesn’t support the features you need, there will be many future releases with functionality that may impact you. You could consider creating custom components while you wait but that takes additional time and effort to develop.

To see the upcoming release documentation, review the Salesforce Product Roadmap.

For more information on migrating to Lightning and the benefits of doing so, see Trailhead.

More questions about rolling out Lightning Experience?

If you have more questions about rolling our the Salesforce Lightning Experience at your organization, we’d love to connect. Please feel free to contact us so we can schedule a no-cost/no-commitment consultation with our team of certified Salesforce experts.

About the author

Stephanie Gaughen is a Senior Pardot Consultant at Concentrix Catalyst. She holds a master’s degree in media and communications. She has a passion for entrepreneurship, technology innovation, and next-generation marketing.