The Salesforce Lightning Module You Need Right Now

via GIPHY

So you know you need to move to Salesforce Lightning but you are having a hard time getting off your butt and finding the time. Welcome to my world. Before Longshore Consulting's Lightning Boot Camp starts May 1st (be sure to click the subscribe button on the right to stay tuned for the latest details!), Trailhead is the best way to get started learning Lightning. 

Still not super motivated? I hear you. Don't worry, #AdminHour has your back! Join super special awesome guest trailblazer Rita Leverett and I on Thursday, April 20, 2017 *live* at 10am PT/1pm ET for #AdminHour: Lightning Trailhead-athon! Together we'll earn a Lightning Trailhead badge, in real time, encouraging and answering each other's questions as we move down the trail together! It will be fun, free, and interactive - join us!

Register for #AdminHour Lightning Trailhead-athon!

Feeling motivated and want instant gratification that only points and badges can provide? Fantastic! Let's take a tour of what Trailhead has to offer in the Lightning department. When we first arrive at Trailhead, I like to find and filter modules and trails based on Lightning Experience, which you can do just like this:

For today and for #AdminHour, let's focus on the App Customization module. Why is this Trailhead module so awesome? Because it essentially teaches you how to customize the Salesforce Lightning Experience in about an hour.​ Let's dig in some more...

Trailhead's App Customization module has five sections. The first is Modify Page Layouts, which is great because for those of us coming from Classic, it's almost exactly the same as what we're used to! So this should take less than the allotted 15 minutes, but the screen shots in Lightning are great for orienting you to where basic items like the edit button and related lists are hiding.

Second we get to Customize Compact Layouts, which is the new for Lightning highlights panel at the top of record pages and is SUPER IMPORTANT because without doing this in your instance you will need to click a lot more (and as of this writing, wait longer), which is bad. 

Now we get some action with Customize Actions which are amazing productivity boosters, which is great since everyone will lose some time getting used to where everything is in Lightning when you first make the migration over from Classic. So why not ask your users what they want and deliver? Now I'm not sure if you should make a global action to deliver each user a pizza when they click 'Order Pizza,' but I'll leave that up to you. 

The fourth module starts to get a bit funky, but hang on, we can do this! Create Custom Objects and Fields is mostly what you know how to do if you know how to create these things in Classic. Great news, right? Yes and no. On this trail, we're going to take our skills up a notch by creating a custom Visualforce help page for your custom object! I know, I know, it sounds really scary. But thanks to Team Trailhead, it's not! There's code you can cut and paste and update for your use case. Surely a raise can't be far behind if you do this, right???

Finally, we conclude our short badge trek with Create and Customize Lightning Apps. This is handy because switching apps looks different in Lightning, and there are a few standard apps that you will probably want to customize or edit right away before you go live with Lightning. Also if you change the name of your standard app from 'Sales' to 'Our Company's Stuff' it might be more clear to people where to go if they accidentally change apps and need to get back to their standard grouping of objects. 

So that's it! What's your favorite Lightning Trailhead Badge? Let me know and it could be the star of a future #AdminHour!