(this is a post from Alli about a project she's been working on mostly without Michelle!)
After coming back from Dreamforce this year, it was impossible to not feel excitement over the newly released Lightning Experience. We all recognize that Lightning is the future for Salesforce, and are eager to get on board, even at this early stage when it’s specifically geared towards sales teams and their pipelines. I was asked to don my “admin” hat and roll it out to our sales team.
astro and i had matching halloween costumes
We've begun the process of rolling out Lightning Experience to our sales team, with a plan to be live in early Q1 -- so even though we're still in the middle of this project, I have some thoughts about what we've lightning-experienced so far.
Everything Has Changed
First, this is the first time in 10 years of working with SF that there's been something new and different enough that I've had to stop and actually learn it from scratch. Lightning isn't just an iteration/improvement on an old thing, there are some fundamental differences in how things work and what's even possible, and that means that I've had to learn it by reading and practicing, not just diving in. (Even the "new" Report Builder in Winter '11 was pretty easy to understand if you had any experience with the old Report Wizard, for example.) So, after I made it through all of the relevant Trailhead lessons, I created a new Sandbox to get into the nitty gritty of it all. Turning “on” Lightning Experience is easy, but understanding what that actually means is the challenge.
Following the Trail
Also, this is the biggest change we've ever really undertaken in our own Salesforce account that hasn't been entirely invented by our own team. We build all sort of custom objects and complex workflows or processes, and things like that, but for those projects, I'm one of our primary Salesforce Admins, so I'm always involved in the development/creation of the new thing -- it's not something external that I've had to learn and become an expert about, because I've usually invented it, so I've been the expert all along! Lightning has required a whole new approach to getting up to speed. Lucky for me, Trailhead and the community were already abuzz with tips and project plans for me to borrow from.
Reviewing Business Processes
And lastly, I realized as we began the project that it's been a while since we last evaluated the business processes in the sales team. Even before getting into LE directly, it's been interesting and valuable to talk to a sales user and learn about the day-to-day tasks (and find out some of the annoying things that we probably could have improved ages ago!). For example, the Opportunity page layout that's assigned to the Sales Team profile has never been customized specifically for them -- and as a result, nearly ¾ of the page real estate is taken up by fields that would never be filled in until the Opportunity is long-since Closed Won. Even if we weren’t going to migrate them to LE, this is something we could easily fix, but only by taking the time to have that discovery conversation.
We're still right in the middle of things -- here's the project plan Trello board as it stands today:
"done" is always the best column
I'll post more updates as we move further along! Next time, I'll talk about some of the most surprising things I've discovered about Lightning Experience and how it's going to change our processes.