Ever since Salesforce announced ‘Meet the New Salesforce’ event, I was quite curious to know what would it mean and contain. The event took place last night and even though it was at the most inconvenient hour of the night in my part of the world, I made sure that I don’t miss it. And I will tell you what – It was worth it.
I was absolutely blown away by the new look and feel that Salesforce is coming up with. It’s cool, sleek, beautiful, elegant, sexy. Fell in love with Salesforce again. One of the speakers in the event mentioned that in the past nobody used to worry so much about the look and feel of the enterprise software and I couldn’t agree more. I had worked on Oracle ERP for almost a decade and though it does well what it does, the look and feel was boring (absolutely no offence to Oracle. I am a big fan of Oracle too)
You can watch the recording of the event at URL https://www.salesforce.com/form/conf/events-global-preview.jsp. Advance the slider to 29:02 minutes on the timescale to dive into the event directly.
If you are pressed for time and can’t watch the whole webinar, here is a deck of slides that I prepared as a quick recap of the “New Salesforce”
And here are some of the notes that I took from the webinar
- What is this New Salesforce – This is a complete new UI (call Lightning based on the lightning technology that Salesforce introduced last year
- In the first release, the UI is mainly focussed around the Sales Cloud
- Lightning UI can be enabled at the organization level, profile level, or permission set level. So you can choose the subset of users you want to enable it for (that is if you don’t want to enable it for everyone.)
- Visualforce Vs. Lightning: Lightning is a next generation technology that replaces Visualforce. Though Salesforce is going to support Visualforce for many more years to come (there are millions and millions of Visualforce pages that exist today and Salesforce just can’t ignore it), this event has made Visualforce a thing of the past. The future is Lightning Technology. And as I heard in the webinar, to ensure that the existing Visualforce pages will work in the new environment, you need to test and you need to check the documentation on things that will work and won’t work. So my reading between the lines is that you just can’t take it for granted that all existing Visualforce pages will continue to work the way its working now.
- If you are embarking on a new project or a new development work, use Lightning. Don’t use Visualforce
- Which one a developer’s should focus on learning – Visualforce or Lightning – The answer is Lightning. Lightning is much more powerful and futuristic.
- How to get started with Salesforce Lightning – Navigate to Trailhead URL https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/modules to do the training and exercises on Salesforce Lightning. Trailhead is a FREE learning tool from Salesforce and just yesterday Salesforce has released 11 new modules on Trailhead, most of which is related to this new technology called Lightning.
- When is it going to be available – Salesforce Lightning is expected to be released in Salesforce’s Winter 16 upgrade. It will become available in the sandboxes first and then your production environment. If you are interested in a Pre-Release access please click here.
- To learn more about Lightning Design Systems, navigate to URL http://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/
When I decided to change the trajectory of my career from Oracle to Salesforce, time and again Salesforce has proved that it was one of the best choices that I made. With Salesforce, there is a “feel good” factor in just using/working on this technology, pretty much similar to the “feel good” kick you get when you use Apple products. There’s no wonder why Salesforce is being awarded as one of the most innovative companies by Forbes year after year.
Perfect Post ..right in time. Informative details