If you’ve been reading my blog posts you know about my journey launching Salesforce Lightning in our org.

Initially I was pretty resistant to switching. I knew it was going to be a lot of work. I was overwhelmed by the perceived magnitude of switching. Classic was familiar. Lighting was some new-fangled UI those darn kids liked and they needed to get off my lawn! Wait…I think I just aged myself there!

But we went there. We hitched up our pants, set aside the fear of the unknown, researched, put together a plan and leaped into Lightning.

And that is where the fun began!

As a self-described Admineloper with no developers on my team and not a lot of budget for contract work, there have always been things our users have asked for or things we have wanted to do that just weren’t feasible.

Things like displaying a banner or pop-up at the top of a record to highlight something. Or showing a screen flow on a record when more info is needed (but only when missing info or only to subset of users). Or providing executive team leads with less clutter (ie fields and related list info) and more analytics (charts/graphs) when viewing a record.

And then there was Lightning…

If you haven’t figured out by now I am enamored with the Lightning experience and the power it has given me (as a non-developer) to provide value and efficiencies for my users and processes.

A few examples:

• With the Rich Text Lightning Component and the ability to set the visibility of it based on a field on the record I can now display or hide a banner at the top of any record to alert my users about something. Maybe the Account is a key account or the Project is at Risk, show the component. Boom! Instant message to your users that there is something important to know.
  • Take that even further and display or hide ANY component based on something on the user record.
• Need to gather additional info if an Opportunity is over a specific amount? Sure you can add extra fields and validation rules to make them required, but how about creating a screen flow with the required fields you need, then, again, set the visibility of the Flow Component to only show on the page when the opportunity value is over the required amount and the fields haven’t been set? The user doesn’t even have to leave the record to fill it in, saving time and keeping the rest of the opp information at their fingertips.
• Create an Executive app where all the Lightning Record Pages are optimized for analytics. Remove or hide the details/related lists behind tabs and add report charts filtered to the Record ID to the page. Now a leader can click on an account and immediately see the pipeline for that account, the historical sales, the forecast, and whatever else they might want to see at a glance. Talk about eye-candy!

And this just scrapes the surface of what an admin can do with the Lightning Experience!

So, yes, it might be daunting to think about switching over. It will be some work, sure. But what you get out of it, for your users, for your company, for your own growth and career will be worth it all!