Since Salesforce’s “Lightning Experience” announcement at Dreamforce 2015, the platform has come a long way. With each release following the announcement right up to the latest, Lightning Experience has been packed with more and more features. Some of the features we looked into at the time have become Salesforce Lightning’s core features.
We hope this blog post will inspire people to either make more use out of their Salesforce Lightning experience, or finally make the move from Classic.
Kanban View
Salesforce opened up this handy feature, originally only available for Opportunities, to Leads, Campaigns and Contacts. See the screenshot from Salesforce’s help guides below:
The Kanban view was later opened up to custom objects. Great news for Salesforce users with their own staged objects!
Identifying and Merging Leads
Following the introduction of Salesforce’s own duplicate management tool in Spring ‘15, they made further enhancements to this with the “Potential Duplicates” Panel. The feature, initially only available for Leads, is completely automated and presents potential dupes on the Lead viewing screen, without the need to search! Of course, this is all fully customisable and administrators are able to define what constitutes a match. Salesforce have enabled a similar panel for Accounts and Contacts since.
Check out the example below:
Clicking “View All” presents each matching Lead:
Comparing the records gives the opportunity to merge:
Lightning Voice (now Lightning Dialer)
The success of a number of Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) apps within the Salesforce space encouraged Salesforce to introduce their own CTI tool in 2016. Lightning Voice, now Lightning Dialer, allows users to make phone calls with their keyboard or the on-screen dialer. This removes the requirement for records to have a phone number associated, as well as granting access to call history and forwarding calls to the sales reps’ mobile phone.
The UI is available globally and allows the integration of a 3rd party system, should system owners want to retain Salesforce’s own look and feel in different regions.
Integrated Email
Email improvements included those below – but this has since been superseded by Einstein Activity Capture.
- Emails can be sent straight from Salesforce and appear in your outbox in Office365 & Gmail
- You can further customise Salesforce user experience within Outlook and swap components in and out, depending on your needs
- Gmail and Google calendar have since been synchronised with Salesforce
Navigation UI
- An app launcher is on the nav bar that allows easy searching across the two “Apps” and “Items” menus
- Each object in the nav menu has a shortcut menu to provide quick access to key functionality and lists
- It’s also possible to brand each individual app – handy, no doubt, for a bit of managed package branding!
Additional Features
- See a month view for the calendar in Lightning Experience
- Take mass actions on list views
- The option to specify an app as a “Classic App”… Whilst all existing apps appear in both Lightning and Classic Experience, creating a new Classic app will need to have the “Show in Lightning Experience” option selected
- It is also possible, from the Lightning app manager, to upgrade an app from Classic to Lightning. The result of which gives two available apps:
- This allows administrators to customise the apps individually. Meaning any tabs which might be fully functional in Classic and not Lightning (or vice versa!), can be easily removed from one app, without impacting the other
- Record pages can now be customised on a “Per App” basis. This feature allows layouts to be specified based on app, record type and profile, for more precise control over content
- Tooltips have been enabled on Lightning Experience record pages, granting access to the admin’s field level hints & tips
Summary
We at BrightGen love staying on top of every release and sharing them ahead of them ahead of time in our quarterly Salesforce Release Webinars. These are just a few of Salesforce Lightning’s core features but we have plenty more blog posts about the more recent additions.
Get in touch if you have not yet moved to Lightning – we can get you there in under five weeks!