Afraid of Lightning?
Four years ago we adopted a sweet little 4 month old puppy from the animal shelter. Her name was Luna and she was quiet and shy and a little skittish. Come to find out she is a Belgian shepherd. The American Kennel Club describes Belgian Shepherd Dogs as “highly intelligent, alert, sensitive to everything going on around them and form very strong relationship bonds.” Luna is very sensitive to storms. In fact, she’s terrified and runs to hide at the very first hint of thunder or lightning. We call her the “fraidy dog”.
Why is she so afraid? The odds of being struck by lightning are, literally, 1 in a million. And, yet, many Salesforce users seem just as terrified of Lightning as Luna. Astrapophobia is the medical term for the fear of lightning but the American Medical Association says it is treatable. Let’s do some proactive astrapophobia treatment by eliminating some of this misconceptions around Lightning.
Lightning will break my Salesforce instance.
As I walked a team through my demo instance, they oohed and aahed and, in very sad voices, asked if they could use Classic instead. “Lightning will break will our system.” Their system administrator told me, “…there are a number of constraints, typically visualforce coded pages, within the solution [their main app] that prevent us enabling Lightning.” With a few exceptions, Visualforce “just works” in Lightning (to quote the Trailhead module). The Visualforce page may not be as pretty as the Lightning page but it’s not broken. And, even if those few exceptions apply to your organization, swapping back to Classic is as simple as the click of a button.
My users will hate Lightning.
Change is always difficult. I can hear the cussing from the other end of my house every time Facebook updates their app. Change for no apparent reason is horrible. But, Lightning is a change for the better. Like flat screen TVs. True story: I was working with a customer who wanted to enable Lightning just for herself; she wanted to be confident of how it worked so she could provide better support for her users. She accidentally enabled it for everyone. “No worries though — they said they’ll stay and learn it now. YAY!” They actually liked it! Plus she is an #awesomeadmin and was able to quickly configure Lightning pages to enhance her team’s productivity. You never know if you’ll like it until you try it.
“By continuing to use Salesforce Classic, you are missing out on resources and capabilities included in your subscription.”
Maybe you got the recent email from Salesforce? FOMO (fear of missing out) is probably the most important fear of all! Lightning offers so many great ways to enhance and simplify what your users do on daily basis. The reports and dashboards along are worth the move. There are several features that are only available in Lightning. Plus, Einstein (Salesforce’s built in artificial intelligence system) is at its best in the Lightning environment.
Is there a Lightning fear you found out was really nothing to worry about at all? Or, is there still a big, silent Lightning scariness that makes you want to crawl under the bed? Share your thoughts!
Interested in joining the conversation online? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll let you know when I schedule a Lightning workshop.
And, once the fear of Lightning is behind you, you’ll enjoy all the sunshiny days to come as much as Luna does!
Don’t miss this great trailhead learning experience (not scary!)https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trails/lex_admin_implementation
A dedicated Salesforce Classic user who just wants to understand where everything correlates in Lightning? Check out this: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/modules/lightning-experience-for-salesforce-classic-users
Let there be Lightning!
