When is the Right Time to Migrate to Salesforce Lightning Experience?

Oh! You are here, which means you are intrigued and excited about Salesforce Lightning experience. Let’s start with a general question that’s on everyone’s mind:

What has been the impact of Salesforce Lightning in the past year?

Sixty-nine percent of users say it is easier to use their Salesforce instance today than it was 12 months ago. That’s an insanely big number!

Lightning is the future of Salesforce. It is packed with a completely new UI/UX and thousands of new components, getting constantly updated, providing access to Salesforce Einstein, and adhering to the philosophy of “No Software.” Lightning provides a reimagined and visually-appealing experience that goes beyond improved UI/UX.

Here Are Some of the Improvements in Lightning:

1. Lightning drives businesses to new levels of user efficiency with new features like Activity Feed, Opportunity Board, and customizable dashboards versus just a large database for tracking contact information earlier.
2. Lightning retrieves relevant customer information quickly and streamlines processes to make workflows more intuitive.
3. Lightning is responsive.
4. You can integrate Lighting with Salesforce Einstein and Analytics to maximize user productivity.

Is your organization ready to migrate to Lightning? And when is the right time to migrate?

To determine the right time to migrate, your organization needs to have a strategy and be clear about its business goals.

Circumstance 1: You Are New to Salesforce

If you are starting out with Salesforce implementation, you must opt for Salesforce Lightning. No second thoughts.

Salesforce will cease to support its classic version, Visualforce.

Salesforce VF might appear more suitable at the moment in some conceivable Greenfield situations, but sooner or later Lightning will come on top.

Newbies can go for Lightning-only from day one. Your system administrators will still have to learn the Classic UI and navigate through both the worlds for the next couple of quarters.

A lot depends on what Salesforce product you are choosing, what your product(s) or services are, and if you really need all the advanced features that Lightning has to offer.

Circumstance 2: If You Are an Existing VF User

If you are an existing Salesforce VF user and you want to migrate to Lightning to leverage the advanced Lightning-only features, then, here is a checklist of the scenarios in which you can initiate the migration:

1. Check the availability of components in Lightning. If the components are what you need, go for the Lightning experience right away.
2. Ensure your existing integration(s) support(s) Lightning version. If they do, it is golden. You are good to go.
3. Ascertain if you can still manage with VF. If you can, then wait and complete other prioritized tasks first.
4. If Salesforce has completely stopped support for your existing components, you have no option but to migrate to Lightning.
5. Migrate to Salesforce Lightning if it has no impact on your data, business logic—such as workflow rules, process builders, and validation rules—and security (including role hierarchy and OWD). However, the migration will have an impact on your user interface, business processes, third-party AppExchange apps, custom code like “Technical Debt”, user training and analytics.

Lightning is indeed an improved edition but not everyone is willing to migrate to it. Based on our experience and discussions with experts, the following are some of the most popular objections preventing organizations from transitioning to Lighting:

• The transition takes a lot of time and effort.
• It is difficult to stay current with new Salesforce functionalities.
• We don’t understand the pros and cons of migration.
• Auditing pre-Lighting customizations will be time-consuming.
• It will strike their process management and they need to train users on a new UI.

More reasons include: Some of the features users want simply aren’t available yet in Lightning. But with each new release, this list has gotten shorter and shorter. While there’s always a workaround, it often involves some investment in time and capital.

If you are evaluating your options in migration to Salesforce Lightning and are looking for some help in consultation, our community migration experts can help you. Contact us.