Quick Facts About the New Lightning UI

You have probably had a chance to try the new Salesforce UI by now. In the previous post, we made an overview of the Lightning Experience  along with the limitations that came with it. We continue to go deeper into the new Salesforce UI and would like to share with you some quick facts about the New Lightning UI. To be more precise we also asked our customers about the changes that they care about the most.

Availability & Price

Lightning Experience will be generally available in Winter ‘16. It will be automatically available to be turned on by an admin in all GE+ orgs in Winter ‘16 except for the Content Management Edition orgs and orgs with person accounts enabled. For more details Salesforce advises to contact a Salesforce representative.

The Lightning Experience will be available to existing customers and net new prospects at no additional cost. It is available for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and any platform license for all Editions: GE, PE, EE, UE and PXE. Customers will have the ability to decide when and for whom they want to enable the new user interface.

AppExchange Apps

Salesforce has asked each partner to get ready for the new Lightning Experience. As part of that, partners will be testing out their apps in the Lightning Experience and making changes to match functionality. When done, the partners’ apps will be marked as Lightning Ready on the AppExchange.

Supported Browsers

Lightning Experience is supported in Microsoft Internet Explorer version 11, Apple Safari version 8.x on Mac OS X, and the most recent stable versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Note: If you’re using Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 7–10, you will be redirected to Salesforce Classic. You can’t access Lightning Experience in a mobile browser. Salesforce recommends you to use the Salesforce1 App when you’re working on a mobile device.

Lightning Framework: the Main User Concerns

1. Heavily customized Salesforce functionality

 Those customers who have a heavily customized UI Salesforce functionality (using MVC Frameworks, eg. AngularJS) are very concerned about transferring their custom interfaces into Lightning. This transformation allows for creating unified UI for desktop and mobile versions and for reflecting custom component or the whole Salesforce1 application. The major concern of such transformation is time and money that already has been spent to customise the functionality. These concerns have grounds because of transformation: in comparison with  back-end, front-end will give us significant changes and will require time. If the current implementation builds on remote actions, you will save the most part of the realization.

2. Lightning framework is still Novice

Lightning is based on an open source Java framework called Aura. Aura framework enables us to build apps completely independent from our data in Salesforce. Despite the fact that Lightning Experience framework generally supports only a part of the Aura functionality, this part will be enough for the development and support Lightning-oriented applications. The new Lightning Experience combines the new Lightning Design System, Lightning App Builder and Lightning Components to enable users to quickly and easily create modern enterprise apps. At Salesforce there is a whole developers community that is responsible for the functionality development, so we don’t need to worry about the changes.

Being the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce continues to impress us. In the Winter’16 Salesforce gives us an opportunity to work with the next generation of the Salesforce CRM - Lightning Experience. It’s great to know that the Salesforce product is based on user and developer feedback.

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