One of the most exciting announcements at Dreamforce this year is Salesforce’s newly designed UI for Sales. Dubbed the “Lightning Experience,” the new UI offers a number of improvements and features that will have a Sales user smiling from ear to ear.
Lightning Experience comes packed with new features focusing on the Sales team’s productivity and user experience. Salesforce designed the new UI to be fast, flexible, and to help Sales users to sell faster by giving them more tools and access to information than they have had before. The new UI is based on the Salesforce 1 Mobile App’s use of the Lightning Framework. It is highly responsive and incredibly easy to customize.
Here are a few of the features that really excited this author as I heard them discussed during a Dreamforce session this morning titled, Overview of What’s New in Sales Cloud:
- Insights brings news and information from top news networks and social media straight to your home page. This helps Sales users stay on top of the very latest information about their Accounts.
- Opportunity Board is a newly designed experience giving Sales users the ability to manage their pipeline by dragging and dropping their opportunities from one stage to another on the board.
- Improved List Views embedded charts bring more power to list views making it easy for Sales users to visualize their data and make decisions.
- New Dashboards bring one of the most requested changes on the Ideas boards to Salesforce. With Lightning Experience dashboards now go beyond the limit of 3 columns. As many as 9 columns can be used for dashboards.
Lightning Experience will become available as part of the Winter ’16 release and is already available in some sandboxes. Flipping a switch makes enabling Lightning Experience easy for the Salesforce Admin. The new experience is managed by profile and permission sets. What this means is Salesforce Admins will have control over which groups of users have access to the new experience.
To find out more about Lightning Experience and if it is a good fit for your organization I recommend taking the Trailhead lessons at https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/. This will give you an in-depth overview using Lightning Experience and rolling it out.
