Guest Post: Favorite Things – Lightning-Style!

So as a reader of my blog, you already know I think Salesforce Lightning is fantabulous! But don’t just take my word for it! There are a whole crew of Lightning Champions out there to help answer all your Lightning Questions.

I’d like to introduce you to one of my very favorite Lightning Champions (and all-around super-duper-awesome-Ohana-member): Barb Dietz!

Barb is the Salesforce Business Analyst / Administrator for NTT DATA Services, she co-leads the Dallas, TX Non-Profit Community Group, is the Program Leader for Summer of Salesforce, is on the Planning Committee for Texas Dreamin’, a Golden Hoodie Recipient, a Trailhead Ranger and hold SIX Certifications! (Phew, I was exhausted just typing that all up !)

Barb love Salesforce Lightning as much as me and has written up this awesome list of favorites – take a look and fall in love with Lightning yourself if you haven’t already:

These are a few of my Favorite things…. About Lightning!

You have the tune from the Sound of Music in your head – right? Well, it’s not Raindrops on Roses or Whiskers on Kittens – but maybe something more like Dynamic Lightning Pages or Customizable Nav Bars.

If you haven’t made your move to Lightning yet, I thought I might entice you with some awesome reasons why you should. There are so many features of lightning that I really like, it’s hard to choose just a few, but let’s give it a try.

Starting with Dynamic Lightning Pages.

Being able to control the visibility of a component based upon the user details, custom permissions, a field value of a record (or related record) brings another dimension to Lightning. It gives you control over what your users see (or don’t see). Maybe certain information is only valuable to a specific set of users, or relevant to a record that meets certain criteria (like Opportunity stage or Close Date). There are dozens of reasons why you may want to save some real estate on your record page and not show a component. You can show one component to one set of users and a different component to a separate set of users. For example, maybe you want to display a dashboard on the Home Page for all your Sales reps that show how much they have sold, what is coming in their pipeline, and what is at risk. That is helpful for an individual Sales person, but what about the Sales Managers? They want to see all the information for the entire team. With Dynamic Lightning Pages you can display one Dashboard for individual sellers and a separate dashboard for the Sales Managers. Controlling the component visibility is done with Clicks – not code and there are so many options and / or use cases where this Lightning feature can be game changer.

Navigation in Lightning is next on my list.

Being able to easily and quickly customize your Navigation bar is a definite productivity win. I love how you can drag and drop to rearrange the tabs on your Nav Bar, you can quickly add a tab for just about anything…. a List View, a Report, a Dashboard, a specific Record (maybe one of your VERY Important Accounts could be saved as a tab on your Nav Bar). The drop-down options available on each tab provides a variety of selections for viewing Recent records, Recent list views, your Favorites all related to that specific tab. It doesn’t get much easier than that to find a record you had just recently been viewing. Walla – it’s right there on that drop-down menu.

Favorites are still one of my favorites 😊

Being able to quickly add a Favorite (with a single click) and go back to that Report, List View, Record, etc… Again, just by clicking on one of your favorites. Favorites are very easy to rearrange, remove, or add new. Definitely a time saver!

Dashboards

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Dashboards on my list of Favorites. The ability to flexibly design a dashboard with the width and height that makes the most sense for each component. You can stretch components out, make them narrow and tall, whatever works best for you. The end result is you can easily create some really nice, eye catching dashboards in Lightning.

The Utility Bar

Utility bar provides quick access to productivity tools, such as Notes; to allow you take notes from any page, maybe a Macro you have configured to quickly complete a set of repetitive steps, a Rich Text utility that provides information about that particular app, or the History of recent items you have accessed (in console apps). The utility bar is a fixed footer for your apps and you can have different utility bars for different apps with different utility items. It’s like a bonus set of Navigation tools.

Pinned List Views

Remember the days when every time you went to a specific tab, you would see a list of the Recently Viewed Records. Well, with Pinned List Views you can set the default list view you would like to have displayed when you go to a Tab. No more recently viewed items – just exactly what you want to see!

I could really go on and on about the cool Lightning Features that are available, but since the title of this post is “A Few of my Favorite Things” – I’ll wrap it up here. If you haven’t made the move to Lightning yet – don’t fear the change. Instead, embrace the opportunity to use some of these great features and experience gains in productivity. Who knows, maybe these will become some of your favorite things in Lightning as well.