5 Salesforce Lightning Transition Tips

As the next generation of the Salesforce platform user interface, Salesforce Lightning represents a major advancement in the customer relationship management (CRM) space. The new interface was built to support organizations as they modernize their digital operations. All future Salesforce innovations will be made in Lightning. For this reason, a strategic transition to Lightning will be necessary for a successful digital transformation.

Here are five tips that will help ensure your Lightning transition is a success.

Salesforce Lightning may seem like a completely new platform to many users and admins. While getting used to new Lightning features may take some time, the main learning curve will be getting used to the new Lightning interface.

As users get used to the new interface, mistakes are likely to occur. To help users adapt, allow them a period of time to switch back and forth. You could also suggest they start their day in Lightning and see how long they can last before moving back. For the best results, select power users first and ask them to provide feedback so you can address any issues you may not have thought about. To get users even more excited, setup a path through which users can learn about the features they didn't already have in Classic.

When you switch to Lightning Experience, the Documents tab that you had in Salesforce Classic will no longer be available. In the long run, this benefits your organization because Lightning files provide tons of additional features, including share via link and upload new versions. Right now, it's somewhat inconvenient because in order to continue using these important documents in Lightning experience, which include PDFs, email templates, and images, you must upload them again as Salesforce Files. 

There are three options for transitioning documents to files:

1. Export documents using your Weekly Export and upload them into files.
2. Use a third-party AppExchange tool, such as Magic Mover from Salesforce Labs.
3. Develop an API-based tool to export the documents and upload them into files.

After you migrate your documents to Lightning experience, don't forget to test to make sure everything's there before removing the documents from Classic. To prevent a major stall to business operations during your Salesforce Lightning migration, set up a data protection foundation that includes backup, monitor, and recovery of all of your Salesforce Documents and Salesforce Files.

While Visualforce pages will still operate in Lightning, they are not optimized for this UI and should be migrated to Lightning experience. The process of transitioning Visualforce pages to Lightning Experience could be complex, depending on your company’s setup.

We suggest migrating page by page to avoid any issues even if you're using a converter tool from the AppExchange. You should also pilot each page with users in a sandbox before pushing to production. As you transition each page, you may find it necessary to develop customizations to ensure any essential functionality is still available. You’ll also need to check that none of your HTML was disrupted during the transition. The best way to ensure the end-user experience and the community is not impacted by the migration is to QA each and every page, especially those that include JavaScript. In addition to the code and functionality, you’ll want to ensure that all of the data, cases related to Knowledge articles, and attachments were moved and mapped correctly. Lastly, you should double-check that all access permissions remained the same post-transition.

Since the URLs in Salesforce Classic are generally straightforward, some Orgs could have custom code will need to be repaired. In Lightning Experience, these URLs may not work, which could impact certain custom workflows or customizations. Before making the transition to Lightning, make sure you’ve checked for URLs and API version in your code to see if they need to be updated.

Before you transition to Salesforce Lightning Experience, make sure you have a data recovery plan in place. This plan should include:

• Daily and on-demand backup during major org changes
• The ability to analyze your org schema to ensure all critical data is accounted for
• A sandbox seeding strategy that enables you to test in sandboxes that contain good data
• Data & metadata change monitoring and alerts
• Compare snapshots to see how your org looked pre and post-deployment
• A documented recover strategy that ensures you're prepared for any data or configuration issues
• Security & compliance audit to ensure your org meets all requirements

With OwnBackup you can transition to Salesforce Lightning with the peace of mind that your data is safe and sound.