Soapbox Engage Blog

The Salesforce Lightning Experience is a slick new user interface layered on top of your existing Salesforce account that focuses on allowing sales teams (or development and fundraising teams in our nonprofit community) to work and close opportunities faster. It is generally available as a feature that can be enabled by Salesforce administrators starting with the Winter '16 release.

If enabled for users, they will see a new link under their user menu to "Switch to the Lightning Experience". This will load a whole new beautiful interface for viewing and interacting with your Salesforce data. If they need to switch back to Salesforce Classic, they can do so by clicking on "Switch to Salesforce Classic" from under their user menu (accessible in the Lightning Experience by clicking on the user avatar).

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To enable or not to enable, that is the question.

The Lightning Experience is tremendously cool, there's no doubt about it. It offers tons of neat new functionality and a beautiful interface that makes data look just oh so much friendlier and more impressive. It also includes great enhancements for list views, report filters, inline email, enhanced notes, etc. You can read more about how great it is here. However! The new stuff is so sexy and compelling that it's easy to miss some of the fine print about what's not included yet, and some of the missing things are pretty critical! Because of the amount of things not supported yet, we're considering this Winter '16 release an "admin release" that allows Salesforce administrators to be able to start exploring and evaluating the Lightning Experience to plan to rollout over the next year (or beyond).

What's not supported yet?

• No Campaign & Campaign Member data
  This is critical for anyone using Soapbox Engage or Soapbox Mailer. If you access your Salesforce database from a user account running the Lighting Experience, you will not be able to view your Campaigns or Campaign Member histories. To view this information, you would need to switch back to Salesforce Classic. This functionality is on the roadmap for the Spring '16 release, so it's not far around the corner, but it's not there yet.
• No ability to "Find/Merge Duplicates" or "Add to Campaign" for Leads
  Again, if you are using Soapbox Engage in particular, you will likely not want to switch to the Lightning Experience until these are supported (or at least not switch your user accounts that need to access these functions).
• No inline editing
  If you are using inline editing a lot (where you double-click a field to make quick edits instead of needing to click the "Edit" button to edit the whole record), you may want to hold off on migrating to the Lightning Experience since this functionality does not yet exist.
• No custom buttons
  If you have custom buttons setup (such as the "Send" button included with Soapbox Mailer or the "Attendee" list button setup for Soapbox Events), these will not appear in the Lightning Experience. Want to get involved in the discussion of how this might be addressed in the future? Join the conversation here.
• No support for person accounts
• No record merging
• No mass email

There are some other things too. For the full list, check out this Trailhead module called "Is the Lightning Experience Right for Me?".

So what does this mean for your organization?

The Lightning Experience is undergoing rapid development, so many of the current limitations will addressed and covered in the next few releases. We highly encourage Salesforce administrators to begin learning about the new functionality and exploring in a sandbox environment so you can be well-educated in creating a plan for if, when and how you will want to start rolling this out to your users. It's up to you as your organization's Salesforce pro to make an informed decision about when your organization may be "Lightning Ready". For more information check out these awesome Trailhead modules:

• Is the Lightning Experience Right for Me?
• Lightning Experience Rollout Guide

And if you have feedback on successes and challenges, we'd love to hear about it! Please share with us and the community through the Power of Us Hub so we can help each other along this journey.