Lightning Series #1 Welcome to Salesforce Lightning

Lightning Series:

Salesforce Introduces Lightning two year back and now almost every organization is moving towards lightning experience. With the Lightning Series I am trying to post each and every information about Salesforce Lightning including What’s new in Lightning, Developing Lightning Component, Learning App Builder, Using Lightning Connector.

In this post, Let’s learn about What is Lightning Experience and what are feature present.

Welcome to Lightning Experience

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.

Lightning Experience will transform Salesforce CRM and extend to service, apps, platform, and more. No matter what department you're in, we understand that the way people work is changing. All this change is greatly influenced by the rise of mobile. Sales reps at your company are already using mobile to research prospective customers, get directions to client meetings, connect socially with customers, and more. We get that. That’s why Lightning Experience takes the cool stuff from the mobile experience and brings it to the desktop.

What About the Previous User Experience?

Salesforce Classic refers to the Salesforce user experience immediately predating Lightning Experience. It’s the one with the row of tabs across the top. If you haven’t customized your logo, you also see the seasonal Salesforce logo in the upper left corner when you’re looking at Salesforce Classic.

So that’s Salesforce Classic, and again, it’s still here. It has to still be here, because not all features are available in Lightning Experience yet, and besides, you might not be ready to move off Salesforce Classic just now. Depending on your company culture, change can take time, and we get that, too. We’ll talk more about change management and migration in another module, since that’s an important topic all on its own.

Back to Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. The first thing you need to know is how to tell when you’re in one or the other. If you see a row of tabs across the top, you’re in Salesforce Classic. If you see a vertical navigation menu, you’re in Lightning Experience.

The row of tabs across the top means you’re in Salesforce Classic

This navigation menu means you’re in Lightning Experience

When Lightning Experience Meets Salesforce Classic

Features that aren’t supported in Lightning Experience don’t appear in Lightning Experience. But don’t fear! You can still get to those features using the Switcher.Not every business scenario is supported in Lightning Experience yet. For example, these scenarios aren’t supported:

• You’ve enabled standard quotes in Salesforce to support your field sales team, so they can generate quotes during customer visits.
• You’ve set up collaborative forecasting for your sales ops team to support the sales process and manage your company’s pipeline.
• You’ve deployed Salesforce Console for Sales for your inside sales team to help them manage multiple leads simultaneously.

What Makes Lightning Experience So Special?

With all its new features and redesigned pages, there are many key benefits to using Lightning Experience.

To kick things off, let’s talk about some of the highlights:

• New record layouts that focus on what you can do instead of what you can view
• Turbocharged list views that let you easily filter and visualize your data
• Beautiful dashboards with components that span both columns and rows
• Sleek report views that you can filter quickly to see the data that's most important to you

Lightning Experience Tour

Home

New Lightning Page has awesome Home Page, now your sales reps can monitor their performance to goal and get insights on their key accounts. Plus, we’ve added an Assistant, which is your users’ action list of things to do. You can also use the Lightning App Builder to create custom Home pages that appear for different profiles.

• Start your day fast with a customizable, intelligent page.
• Use the Performance Chart to monitor how close you are to crushing your numbers.
• See relevant, timely news articles about customers, partners, and competitors with Account Insights.
• See upcoming meetings and tasks due today.
• Use the Assistant to identify key issues to work on today.
• Focus your selling activities on your Top Deals.

Opportunity Workspace

Lightning Experience includes action-optimized workspace, designed to help your sales reps work their deals faster and smarter. You can customize coaching scripts for each step in the sales process, create records quickly with fewer clicks, and ultimately close deals faster.

• Showcase key record details in the new highlights panel at the top of the page.
• Use the handy composer to quickly log calls, create tasks, send emails, and more.
• Get key coaching details with a customizable sales path to support your sales process.
• See a wealth of related information on hover using quick view, without ever leaving the opportunity page.
• Add related records—like contacts—in context with minimal clicks.
• View relevant, timely news about the account the opportunity’s associated with.

Opportunity Kanban

Introducing Opportunity Kanban, a visualization tool for opportunities, where sales reps can visually review deals organized by each stage in the pipeline. With drag-and-drop functionality, sales reps can move deals from one stage to another, and get personalized alerts on key deals in flight.

• Visualize your deals at each stage in the sales cycle.
• Move deals between stages using drag-and-drop functionality.
• See alerts that notify you when action is needed on a key deal.

Accounts and Contacts

Like with opportunities (and leads), we’ve optimized the layout for accounts and contacts, organizing the content by their primary use case: reference. Now your sales reps can find information and gather insights at a glance.

• Get the latest news for your customers with integrated Twitter and Account Insights.
• Work smarter and keep your data clean with field-level duplicate matching.
• Locate important data efficiently with the redesigned Lightning Experience page layout.
• Review past and upcoming activities at a glance.

Reports and Dashboards

Sales reps will love the ability to create their own filters on reports. You will appreciate the updated dashboard editor, which features components that span both columns and rows.

• Create filters while viewing a report.
• Make visually awesome dashboards with more than three columns.
• Easy migration from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience, with reports and dashboards automatically viewable and inheriting all permissions and sharing settings defined in Salesforce Classic.

List Views

Now your sales reps can visualize any list view graphically with a handy chart, or easily apply filters to narrow the results.

Visualize your data in seconds with list view charts, and quickly create filters to slice your data how you want.

• Create new list views by using Lightning Experience’s intuitive filters panel.
• Use type-ahead search to find a favorite list view fast.
• Automatically open your list views created in Salesforce Classic from Lightning Experience.

Other Highlights

• Navigate through pages more easily with the space-saving, collapsible left navigation menu, which you can customize for various types of users (such as sales reps, sales manager, or execs).
• See open tasks, planned meetings, and accomplishments in the activity timeline on each opportunity, lead, account, and contact.
• Find your tasks on a new page for tasks, including the new master-detail view, which lets you see a single task and your entire list of tasks side by side.
• Use phone features without ever leaving Salesforce. You can make and receive calls, add call notes, and log call information with ease.
• Send email through Gmail or Office 365 accounts with your Salesforce email. See the emails you’ve sent in your Gmail or Office 365 Sent Items folder for seamless integration.
• Take better notes with auto-save, rich text capabilities, inline images, and versioning. You can even relate a note to multiple records and share notes with teammates or Chatter groups.
• Enjoy a richer file preview experience that doesn’t require Adobe Flash Player.
• Find records faster with improved search, which includes recent records and top results.

So is Lightning Experience Right for You?

At this point, you’re probably starting to think about whether or not Lightning Experience is a good fit for your company. This is good, and part of the point of this content is to help you make that choice.

Ultimately, your decision comes down to this: does the rad stuff you get with Lightning Experience outweigh what you can’t do without Salesforce Classic?

Happy Learning!!

Stay tune for more post on Lighting …

Reference :

• Salesforce Trailhead   
• Video: “Lightning Experience: Let’s Take It for a Spin” (end user focused)