are you ready for salesforce lightning? - … · release new applications and features by an ......

ARE YOU READY FORSALESFORCE LIGHTNING?

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In the cloud and social era, both customers and workers have grown accustomed to fast-improving digital experiences. The digital age has exposed a new challenge for companies the world over — employee experiences are lagging far behind the experiences being created for consumers. According to Salesforce’s 2017 State of IT report, 71 percent of employees say they want their companies to provide them with the same level of technology as they use in their personal lives; the kind of technology they can access on their tablet or smartphone, whenever and wherever they are.1

In most cases, the seamless User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) of consumer applications collapses as soon as you hit the office doors, or when you’re in the field in front of your clients. As enterprises are moving towards consumerization, it becomes even more important to empower your workers (i.e., employees, contractors, vendors, partners) with tools that work for them, and an experience that supports their needs and sparks their

1. Salesforce Research: 2017 State of IT Report.

passion for the job. Your Worker Experience needs to be just as exceptional and engaging as your Customer Experience.

In this “Age of the Customer”, organizations put a high value on UX and agility, and rightly so. Design is a powerful tool that can either empower or disrupt your worker and customer experiences. Also, getting the UI right is a key factor in securing user adoption and driving positive business outcomes.

Design is a powerful tool that can either empower or disrupt your worker and customer experiences.

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When Lightning strikes

Salesforce pioneered the cloud revolution with Salesforce Classic, but its fast-paced, mobile-centric users were looking for more intuitive and easy-to-customize User Interfaces. Enter Salesforce Lightning, a next-level platform designed to replace Salesforce Classic, and one that offers a more flexible, mobile-friendly UI. Lightning is powered with tools like Lightning App Builder and Lightning Design System, which are highly adaptive, user-friendly, and leverage the power of good design to encourage adoption and efficiency. Lightning even reduces the time it takes to release new applications and features by an impressive 59 percent, and speeds up the application development lifecycle by 50 percent, allowing businesses to be more agile.2

With Lightning, Salesforce has undoubtedly brought the most significant uplift to its UI, but Salesforce Lightning also represents the next generation Salesforce Platform, with a completely re-imagined user experience.

However, Lightning’s features are not limited to UI/UX; it also boasts a broad spectrum of tools and offerings, with significant upgrades to the existing platform. Let’s take a deep dive into what Salesforce Lightning has to offer.

2. Salesforce: How Lightning App Development Can Accelerate Your Entire Business. By Jon Sigler, March 14, 2017.

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Lightning Experience — A set of modern UIs optimized for speed and agility.

The foundation of Lightning Experience is a user-centric design approach, focused on providing a modern, beautiful, and seamless UX on both mobile and desktop. The intuitive interface of Lightning for Sales helps sales reps work more naturally and close deals faster, with recommended actions provided by artificial intelligence. Salesforce has also enhanced the Worker Experience for customer support agents, with new releases of Lightning for Service, and the recently launched Lightning Service Console.

Some of the notable features include a redefined homepage experience, with efficient navigation and quick access to productivity tools like Notes and Recent Items in the utility bar, enhanced search and dynamic tab navigation, Path, Kanban view for opportunities and cases, enhanced workspaces, charts on list views, beautiful dashboards, and sleek report views.

Lightning Component Framework — A JavaScript framework and set of standard components provided to customize your Lightning Experience.

The Lightning Component framework is a UI framework for developing responsive dynamic web applications. It is an event-driven framework that provides standard pre-built components, libraries to build custom components, and a runtime environment for building single-page applications, with dynamic, responsive UIs for Force.com apps.


It is developed on the open-source Aura framework, which supports partitioned multi-tier component development, and enables you to build apps completely independent of your data in Salesforce. It uses JavaScript on the client side and Apex on the server side.

Other general-purpose frameworks like AngularJS are more platform-agnostic, whereas Lightning components are designed to connect natively with Salesforce and Force.com platforms, enabling developers to work faster with improved efficiency.

Lightning App Builder — A visual building tool with drag-and-drop capabilities for customizing and building applications.

Lightning App Builder provides a kind of “Lego experience” — where you join smaller components together using drag-and-drop features to build applications quickly, without the need to be a hard-core developer. You can do rapid development by leveraging off-the-shelf and custom-developed Lightning components.

The Lightning App Builder not only empowers you to quickly customize and build apps visually, without code, but also provides a productivity boost, by serving as a platform to host components that can be reused in the future by other applications.

Salesforce’s Lightning Design System (SLDS) — UI Library, style guides and design guidelines to build Lightning-compliant Salesforce apps.

The Lightning Design System provides developers with access to a UI library of fonts, icons, CSS framework, and design guidelines, to help them build custom applications that comply with the new Salesforce Lightning look and feel. Developers can take advantage of patterns and established best practices that are native to Salesforce, to provide a more consistent UX while developing custom pages without reverse-engineering the UI as custom CSS.

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Lightning Bolt — Framework for deploying next-generation communities and portals faster.

Salesforce has seen tremendous success with Community Cloud, but as customers enable more multiple communities, they’ll want to go faster and significantly improve on the time-to-market.

With Bolt, developers can leverage Lightning Components to build Bolt solutions that have deep business logic inherited from Salesforce CRM. Lightning Bolt solutions are templated communities or portals that have been built to address industry-specific use cases (e.g., patient engagement, vendor management). Salesforce partners have developed many such Bolt solutions, such as the Retail Store Collaboration solution from Appirio — now available on the AppExchange.

Salesforce Connect/Salesforce Lightning Connect — Framework including pre-built adaptors which enable view, search, and modification of data from external sources.

Salesforce Connect provides a framework to retrieve and modify data that is outside your Salesforce org, using web service callouts. Instead of copying the data into your org, you can use external objects (similar to custom objects) and a set of prebuilt adaptors to access the data in real time from external systems and data sources (e.g., SAP).


However, if you need frequent access to large amounts of external data, ETL (extract, transform, load) might still be your best option for optimal performance. Salesforce Connect should not be seen as a replacement for ETL; instead, it provides a complementary approach for accessing external data for seamless integration with the Salesforce platform.

Lightning Out — Run Lightning Components outside of Salesforce.

With Lightning Out, developers can now bundle and expose Lightning Components similar to Javascript library, so they can be accessed outside the Salesforce platform.

LockerService For Lightning Components — Enhanced security architecture for Lightning Components.

As part of the Lightning framework, Salesforce has not only focused on UI and UX, but also stepped up security, by introducing LockerService for Lightning Components. LockerService provides a governing framework that embraces security best practices to eliminate the possibility of cross-site scripting attacks. Your Lightning Apps and Components are safeguarded from possible vulnerabilities as LockerService restricts unauthorized access to your code and data from non-published framework internals.

Lightning Exchange — For functionalities or Components not available in Salesforce, one can go to the AppExchange — a unified marketplace governed by Salesforce and Salesforce partners, where third-party vendors can list custom applications and Components developed by them. There are hundreds of Lightning-ready applications available on the AppExchange today.


Do you have a Lightning strategy?

Although Lightning is more user-friendly and adaptive, not all core features of Salesforce Classic are yet available on the Lightning platform. While Salesforce Lightning is a step in the right direction for a more intuitive UX, the best approach to your organization’s Lightning transition strategy will depend on several factors. We understand that companies need to continuously improve Salesforce’s ease-of-use to achieve superior customer and worker experiences, but it’s not recommended to simply switch to Lightning without having a strategic roadmap in place.

Your approach to Lightning transformation should be strategic, and carved-out after doing a thorough impact assessment of your current Salesforce org. While the decision to transition to Lightning is a unique decision for each organization, we believe the future of Salesforce UI lies with Lightning. So it would make sense to start carving out this strategy sooner rather than later.

Once you understand the benefits of the various tools and offerings of the Lightning platform, you should start putting together a Lightning roadmap (rather than tweaking your existing VisualForce strategy). Also, when you think about mapping out your strategy, you shouldn’t limit the scope to Lightning Experience, but should also look at the Lightning Platform in totality. Besides a responsive and

intuitive UI, application development with minimal coding and reusability are other compelling benefits of Lightning over Visualforce.

An organization’s Lightning transition should not only be aimed at enhancing UX, but also seen as a major step towards productivity improvement. It can be a change agent in your organization, and play a key role in improving worker and customer experiences. Lightning is the future, and will be the focus for all new Salesforce innovation.


Making the transition

There are four key tenets to your Lightning transition:

1. Level of customization in your current org. If you decide to enable Lightning Experience, existing customizations within your Salesforce org may not transfer into Lightning. Your VisualForce pages — which provide custom features or custom analytics — would need to be Lightning-enabled, by restyling or converting to components before being accessible in Lightning. You may also have to tweak custom Java buttons, custom links, and custom page layout actions. So, it is extremely important to assess the current state of your org in terms of level of customization.

2. Importance of UI and UX. A beautiful user interface for your customer- or employee-facing applications is a great place to represent your brand. For a delightful customer and worker experience, it is equally important to focus on how a user interacts with the interface or see how many clicks it takes for a user to get through a process. An application with a good UI and UX facilitates efficiency in completing tasks because the users can easily locate and execute desired functionality. In today’s mobile-first world, users expect a consistent experience across devices.

Customization

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UI and UX

Change Management

Lightning is the Future It’s evident that to experience the continued value of Salesforce, all Salesforce customers must have a clearly defined Lightning transition roadmap.

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3. The future with Lightning. Salesforce is not abandoning Salesforce Classic anytime soon, but the majority of their focus is now on Lightning. Most of their clouds have already undergone — or are currently undergoing — design overhauls. Some of the newer ones — like Financial Services — have been released only with the Lightning Experience interface.

Salesforce’s release pattern clearly indicates that all future UX platform upgrades and enhancements will be around Lightning. We are also aware that the AI capability of Salesforce Einstein is only available on Lightning. It’s evident that to experience the continued value of Salesforce, all Salesforce customers must have a clearly defined Lightning transition roadmap.

4. Managing and enabling change. Although Lightning provides an appealing and more intuitive UX than Salesforce Classic, it may take some time for users of Classic to adjust and adapt to it. Adoption levels will be much higher once stakeholders understand the features and benefits of Lightning to the company and themselves. Managing and enabling change will be key to your success, so having a strong change management plan in place is critical.


Choosing the right approach

Your transition approach may vary slightly depending on the size and complexity of your Salesforce org, but the underlying design principles will be more or less the same.

Once you have analyzed the four tenets against your company needs and understand the features of Lightning, you’re ready for the Lightning Experience Readiness Check, and Impact Assessment.

Perform the Lightning Experience Readiness Check. You can use the Run Readiness Check from within your org by using the out-of-the-box tool provided by Salesforce. The tool enables you to evaluate whether or not key features and customizations you’ve implemented in Salesforce Classic are ready for Lightning Experience. The tool does a comprehensive assessment of your org, including user profiles, objects, related lists, custom buttons and links, components, filters, and VisualForce overrides, and more, to generate a personalized Readiness Report. This report provides broad recommendations on areas that may need attention before you switch over your users to Lightning Experience.

The Preview Feature, which is part of the Migration Assistant, is another useful tool that allows you to explore your production org in Lightning Experience, so you can see exactly how your real data and current customizations will work in the new interface.


Assess the impact. Once you receive the Lightning Readiness Report from Salesforce — which will have a set of recommendations for your org — it would make sense to analyze the gaps and assess the impact. There could be several methodologies and ways you can approach this, but the key is to work with stakeholders and identify the severity of each gap.

You should also bear in mind that not all the core features of Salesforce Classic (e.g., Territory Management) are yet available on the Lightning platform. Your decision on Lightning transition could largely depend upon your usage of unavailable features and assessment of the Lightning Roadmap. Analyzing gaps and doing an impact assessment is one of those areas where it pays to have a team of experts or third-party advice.

In its continued journey to paint several Lightning success stories for enterprises, Appirio has also developed a unique Lightning Implementation Methodology “LEX EXPRESS” for enterprises with low- to medium-level customization. With LEX EXPRESS, Appirio is able to deliver quick time-to-value with predictable cost models. Powered by strong Change Enablement expertise and a comprehensive Lightning asset repository, Appirio teams are able to deliver success with speed and agility.

For customers with deeper levels of customizations, Appirio recommends assessing the impact of migration by conducting a detailed Gap and Feature Assessment before outlining the Lightning Migration Roadmap.

Ready to make the move to Lightning? We’re here to help.

To benefit from everything Salesforce Lightning has to offer, and to see how Appirio can help you in your transformation journey, contact us today.

CLICK HERE

https://appirio.com/contact-us

are you ready for salesforce lightning? - … · release new applications and features by an ......

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