In this article by Rakesh Gupta, author of the book Mastering Salesforce CRM Administration, we will start with the overview of the Salesforce Lightning Experience and its benefits, which takes the discussion forward to the various business use cases where it can boost the sales representatives’ productivity. We will also discuss different Sales Cloud and Service Cloud editions offered by Salesforce.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Getting started with Lightning Experience

Lightning Experience is a new generation productive user interface designed to help your sales team to close more deals and sell quicker and smarter. The upswing in mobile usages is influencing the way people work. Sales representatives are now using mobile to research potential customers, get the details of nearby customer offices, socially connect with their customers, and even more.

That's why Salesforce synced the desktop Lightning Experience with mobile Salesforce1.

Salesforce Lighting Editions

With its Summer'16 release, Salesforce announced the Lightning Editions of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The Lightning Editions are a completely reimagined packaging of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, which offer additional functionality to their customers and increased productivity with a relatively small increase in cost.

Sales Cloud Lightning Editions

Sales Cloud is a product designed to automate your sales process. By implementing this, an organization can boost its sales process. It includes Campaign,Lead, Account, Contact,OpportunityReport, Dashboard, and many other features as well,. Salesforce offers various Sales Cloud editions, and as per business needs, an organization can buy any of these different editions, which are shown in the following image:

Let’s take a closer look at the three Sales Cloud Lightning Editions:

• Lightning Professional: This edition is for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It is designed for business needs where a full-featured CRM functionality is required. It provides the CRM functionality for marketing, sales, and service automation. Professional Edition is a perfect fit for small- to mid-sized businesses. After the Summer'16 release, in this edition, you can create a limited number of processes, record types, roles, profiles, and permission sets. For each Professional Edition license, organizations have to pay USD 75 per month.
• Lightning Enterprise: This edition is for businesses with large and complex business requirements. It includes all the features available in the Professional Edition, plus it provides advanced customization capabilities to automate business processes and web service API access for integration with other systems. Enterprise Editions also include processes, workflow, approval process, profile, page layout, and custom app development. In addition, organizations also get the Salesforce Identity feature with this edition. For each Enterprise Edition license, organizations have to pay USD 150 per month.
• Lightning Unlimited: This edition includes all Salesforce.com features for an entire enterprise. It provides all the features of Enterprise Edition and a new level of Platform flexibility for managing and sharing all of their information on demand. The key features of Salesforce.com Unlimited Edition (in addition to Enterprise features) are premier support, full mobile access, and increased storage limits. It also includes Work.com, Service Cloud, knowledge base, live agent chat, multiple sandboxes and unlimited custom app development.

While purchasing Salesforce.com licenses, organizations have to negotiate with Salesforce to get the maximum number of sandboxes. To know more about these license types, please visit the Salesforce website at https://www.salesforce.com/sales-cloud/pricing/.

Service Cloud Lightning Editions

Service Cloud helps your organization to streamline the customer service process. Users can access it anytime, anywhere, and from any device. It will help your organization to close a case faster. Service agents can connect with customers through the agent console, meaning agents can interact with customers through multiple channels. Service Cloud includes case management, computer telephony integration (CTI), Service Cloud console, knowledge base, Salesforce communities, Salesforce Private AppExchange, premier+ success plan, report, and dashboards, with many other analytics features.

The various Service Cloud Lightning Editions are shown in the following image:

Let’s take a closer look at the three Service Cloud Lightning Edition:

• Lightning Professional: This edition is for SMEs. It provides CRM functionality for customer support through various channels. It is a perfect fit for small- to mid-sized businesses. It includes features, such as case management, CTI integration, mobile access, solution management, content library, reports, and analytics, along with Sales features such as opportunity management and forecasting. After the Summer'16 release, in this edition, you can create a limited number of processes, record types, roles, profiles, and permission sets. For each Professional Edition license, organizations have to pay USD 75 per month.
• Lightning Enterprise: This edition is for businesses with large and complex business requirements. It includes all the features available in the Professional edition, plus it provides advanced customization capabilities to automate business processes and web service API access for integration with other systems. It also includes Service console, Service contract and entitlement management, workflow and approval process, web chat, offline access, and knowledge base. Organizations get Salesforce Identity feature with this edition. For each Enterprise Edition license, organizations have to pay USD 150 per month.
• Lightning Unlimited: This edition includes all Salesforce.com features for an entire enterprise. It provides all the features of Enterprise Edition and a new level of platform flexibility for managing and sharing all of their information on demand. The key features of Salesforce.com Unlimited edition (in addition to the Enterprise features) are premier support, full mobile access, unlimited custom apps, and increased storage limits. It also includes Work.com, Service Cloud, knowledge base, live agent chat, multiple sandboxes, and unlimited custom app development.

While purchasing the licenses, organizations have to negotiate with Salesforce to get the maximum number of sandboxes. To know more about these license types, please visit the Salesforce website at https://www.salesforce.com/service-cloud/pricing/.

Creating a Salesforce developer account

To get started with the given topics in this, it is recommended to use a Salesforce developer account. Using Salesforce production instance is not essential for practicing.

If you currently do not have your developer account, you can create a new Salesforce developer account. The Salesforce developer account is completely free and can be used to practice newly learned concepts, but you cannot use this for commercial purposes. To create a Salesforce developer account follow these steps:

1. Visit the website http://developer.force.com/.
2. Click on the Sign Up button.
3. It will open a sign up page; fill it out to create one for you. The signup page will look like the following screenshot:

   

4. Once you register for the developer account, Salesforce.com will send you login details on the e-mail ID you have provided during the registration.

By following the instructions in the e-mail, you are ready to get started with Salesforce.

Enabling the Lightning Experience for Users

Once you are ready to roll out the Lightning Experience for your users, navigate to the Lightning Setup page, which is available in Setup, by clicking Lightning Experience. The slider button at the bottom of the Lightning Setup page, shown in the following screenshot, enables Lightning Experience for your organization:.

Flip that switch, and Lightning Experience will be enabled for your Salesforce organization. The Lightning Experience is now enabled for all standard profiles by default.

Granting permission to users through Profile

Depending on the number of users for a rollout, you have to decide how to enable the Lightning Experience for them. If you are planning to do a mass rollout, it is better to update Profiles.

Business scenario:Helina Jolly is working as a system administrator in Universal Container. She has received a requirement to enable Lightning Experience for a custom profile, Training User.

First of all, create a custom profile for the license type, Salesforce, and give it the name, Training User. To enable the Lightning Experience for a custom profile, follow these instructions:

1. In the Lightning Experience user interface, click on page-level action-menu | ADMINISTRATION | Users | Profiles, and then select the Training User profile, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

2. Then, navigate to theSystem Permission section, and select the Lightning Experience User checkbox.

Granting permission to users through permission sets

If you want to enable the Lightning Experience for a small group of users, or if you are not sure whether you will keep the Lightning Experience on for a group of users, consider using permission sets. Permission sets are mainly a collection of settings and permissions that give the users access to numerous tools and functions within Salesforce. By creating a permission set, you can grant the Lightning Experience user permission to the users in your organization.

Switching between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic

If you have enabled Lightning Experience for your users, they can use the switcher to switch back and forth between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

The switcher is very smart. Every time a user switches, it remembers that user experience as their new default preference. So, if a user switches to Lightning Experience, it is now their default user experience until they switch back to Salesforce Classic. If you want to restrict your users to switch back to Salesforce Classic, you have to develop an Apex trigger or process with flow. When the UserPreferencesLightningExperiencePreferred field on the user object is true, then it redirects the user to the Lightning Experience interface.

Summary

In this article, we covered the overview of Salesforce Lightning Experience. We also covered various Salesforce editions available in the market. We also went through standard and custom objects.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Configuration in Salesforce CRM [article]
• Salesforce CRM Functions [article]
• Introduction to vtiger CRM [article]