Migrating To Lightning Experience – Three Starter Tips

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Migrating to the Lightning Experience in Salesforce can be quite intimidating. There are many pieces to this puzzle of migration, and it is important to start off on the right foot. Here are three key things to keep in mind when starting to look at the Lightning Experience migration process:

1.First and foremost, run your Lightning Readiness Report.

The Lightning Readiness report is generated directly from your existing Salesforce org. It assesses your org setup and gives you an idea of how ready you are to migrate to Lightning. Based on how your company is using Salesforce, the report will provide reasons why you should make the move. For example, it will show how many more deals you can close per year with Lightning or how many more leads you can acquire each month. It will also show, and this is my favorite part, an estimate of hours you will need to spend on development, configuration, administration, change management, user testing, and user training based on your current org setup.

When I was first migrating our main org to Lightning, the readiness report estimated I would need seven hours for development, configuration, and administration just for our current home pages. It also estimated that I would need two hours for change management, user testing, and user training for those same home pages. This was so helpful when I was planning my project timeline for migration.  The readiness report breaks down the estimated hours by feature, such as Visualforce pages, sidebar components, custom buttons and links, etc.

Another great feature of the readiness report is that it shows, by profile, which items need attention. For example, for our “Warehouse” profile, I needed to focus particularly on custom button JavaScript for cases. Getting the information this way is helpful, especially if you are planning to roll out Lightning in phases by groups of users.

The readiness report might not assess every feature that you use, but you can go to the help and training portal to see what the report does assess. https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=lex_readiness_check_whats_checked.htm&type=5

If your Salesforce org has been set up for a long time, the report might assess more than necessary. So, if you have objects in your org that you no longer use, just skip over those in the report. You don’t want to spend your time configuring something in Lightning that you are no longer using.

Think you can just run the readiness report once? Wrong! You can run it as often as you need to, and you should run it more than once. As you work through your migration, rerun the report to see how much progress you’ve made. It can be very encouraging to see this progress. You will need that encouragement!

2. Salesforce provides you with a free consultation to discuss your Lightning migration.

Once you have run your readiness report, Salesforce will send you an email inviting you to sign up for a free consultation to help you prepare for your transition. Now, this is not necessarily a one-on-one, ask-as-many-questions-as-you-want meeting…but it is very helpful. The consultations are offered as small group discussions. You will have several options for registration times. Depending on the time you pick, you could be the only customer on the call or there could be a few others.

During the call, the presenter will go through some slides to help you outline your transition plan. They will also send you the slide deck after the call. When the call starts, you might initially be muted, but you can unmute and ask questions.

The call presenter will discuss the readiness report and the stages of transition: Discover, Rollout, Optimization. The flow of the presentation is steady but not too fast. Good news…you can participate in this consultation/call more than once if necessary.

3. Remember that Lightning does not yet support all Salesforce Classic functionality.

Although Lightning is an amazing tool, it is not yet perfect. It currently does not support every single Salesforce Classic feature. It may support every Salesforce Classic feature that your company utilizes, which would be great! If that’s the case, you will be golden. But, if you find that you are using a Classic feature that is not supported in Lightning, you and your users can easily switch between the two interfaces as often as you need. If there is no need to switch back and forth, you can turn off that option and require your users to completely adopt the Lightning Experience.

Check out this document to get a sense for which features are available in Lightning vs. Classic. Although not a complete list, it does highlight a lot of features.

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=lex_aloha_comparison.htm&type=5

Like I said, the migration to Lightning Experience can be intimidating…but don’t worry. So many others have taken this journey before you — you are not alone. Between Salesforce Trailhead, the Trailblazer Community, consultants, and bloggers, there is a plethora of resources to help. You just need to make sure you do your research and make a plan for success.

Best of luck!