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Migrating to Salesforce Lightning: The Fast, the Beautiful and the Unique

May 02, 2019

Salesforce Lightning provides a modern, robust and productive user experience designed to help boost sales and services and support customers. It's not just an interface, it's all the features and functionalities built in a way to help deliver customer success.

As many of you have heard, migrating to Lightning has been a hot topic of conversation for the past few years. Salesforce will be taking a big step toward the future on Oct 12, 2019, by flipping the switch and making Lightning Experience the default for all users.

In reality, of course, it's not as easy as just flipping a switch. There are migration issues you need to watch out for, such as:

  • Custom URLs
  • Java buttons
  • Visualforce pages
  • Managed package compatibility

All these pieces of the puzzle can potentially delay the migration roadmap and will inevitably decrease Salesforce utilization. To avoid missing or overrating these problems, you need to review your business processes, examine the utilization level, and validate the level of effort indicated on the Salesforce readiness report (more details on that below) with actual use cases.

Lightning Fast: Buckle Up and Get Ready

Depending on how customized your Salesforce instance and business processes are, Lightning migration can range from two months to more than two years. A great starting point is a review of Salesforce's Lightning Experience readiness report. It lays out the components that need to be migrated with an estimated level of effort, which serves as a great reference for planning out your migration journey.

As Lightning and Classic features evolve rapidly, keeping up with release notes and Lightning vs. Classic feature comparisons will help you prepare for the move. Don't forget Salesforce's native training platform, Trailhead; from there you can find tons of Lightning-related modules and trails to familiarize yourself with Lightning's features and help you get ready for the ride.

Lightning Beautiful: Always a Scenic Route

From a beautifully designed UI and page layouts, to customized components and Einstein (Wave) analytics reporting, Lightning shines everywhere. But during a migration, it's easy to miss some of the things that make it so appealing. To paint a full picture for your migration journey, you need a strategic plan that includes:

  • A Project and budget plan with a timeline and milestones
  • Business process review
  • A predefined KPI on success metrics
  • User stories summarizing the who, what, when, how and why
  • A pilot group of "power users" to challenge, design, adopt and train
  • Change management to drive ultimate user adoption

Lightning Unique: Your Path, Your Way

Each Lightning migration journey is unique, with its own challenges and sparks. But don't view it as a long, painful process conducting research, holding team meetings and custom developing your own solution. Instead, use this as an opportunity to revamp your Salesforce instance for better utilization and user adoption.

Our Saleforce experts can help you assess, plan and execute your migration to Lightning. Contact us to learn more about optimizing your journey.

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