3 Custom Home Pages You Can Build in Lightning

Are you tired of seeing that “Quarterly Performance Chart” on your home page every time you log in to Salesforce? While that information may be great for your sales users, the rest of your users probably want to see other data more relevant to their job functions. Well, great news! With Summer ‘16, you can customize Salesforce home pages for your users by using the Lightning App Builder.

With Summer ‘16, we have the power as Salesforce Admins to build different home pages featuring charts, lists, recent items, tasks, rich text – any number of components – and assign different home pages for each user profile. This is the ultimate way to customize your users’ Salesforce experience, making their jobs easier and your business run smoother. AND make you look like an #AwesomeAdmin in just a few easy steps.

How do I build a custom home page?

To build a custom home page, you need to use the Lightning App Builder. This means you need to be using the Lightning Experience. For more information on how to migrate to Lightning, check out the Migrate to Lightning trail.

Go to Setup and type in “Builder” in the search bar to find the Lightning App Builder. Then select the “New” button and select “Home Page” as the type.

If you want to install components from the AppExchange like I did for some of these examples, you will have to enable MyDomain. This is also best practice for any org, check out this Traillhead module to learn more. You can enable MyDomain by typing “My Domain” in Setup search. Pick a custom domain name, and follow the steps outlined on the My Domain wizard.

Now let’s check out some example Home pages you can build in Lightning!

#1: For Admins

Before building my custom admin Home page, I installed the Adoption Dashboards pack from the AppExchange.

What do admins care about?

We care about staying on top of all of our tasks, and track how our users are using Salesforce so we can identify superusers and gaps in adoption. We also want to stay on top of the conversations happening in Salesforce, and be able to quickly navigate to the parts of the app that we are working on. Let’s use the Lightning App Builder to build a Home page that gives us all this information in one place.

Here are the standard and custom components I added to my admin Home page:

• Jumbotron (Jumbotron from Silverline from the Component Exchange): Customize an image, message, and link button to useful resources, like admin.salesforce.com
• Report Chart: Opportunities that need attention – keep an eye on opportunity records that haven’t been touched to make sure your company doesn’t miss potential deals
• Report Chart: Logins by Dept – see how departments are using Salesforce and identify super users
• Report Chart: New Accounts by Type – Keep an eye of how the Sales team is using the app
• Recent Records: Make it easy to navigate back to what you are working on
• Filtered List: Active Groups – stay on top of the conversations happening across the company

Note: When this post went live in July 2016, I originally had the Task Calendar from Oktana as part of this page. That component is no longer available.

#2: For Customer Service Managers

Before building my custom service manager Home page, I installed the Service & Support Dashboards pack from the AppExchange.

What do service managers care about?

Teamwork! They want to make sure their team is engaged, solving customer problems quickly, and continuing to improve customer experience. This means we want to give them easy access to performance and product data, and provide ways for them to easily engage and train their team.

Here is what I added to my service manager home page:

• Rich Text: Custom announcement with link to current activity to drive participation
• Report Chart: Time per Account – identify which accounts are taking the most representative time
• Report Chart: Cases by Reason – track common issues to make product improvements
• Report Chart: Open Cases by Rep – track caseload for each team member
• Filtered List: Devices with pictures in rich text fields to see the products customers are using
• Jumbotron (Jumbotron from Silverline from the Component Exchange) – Customize an image, message, and link button to training
• Filtered List: My Open Cases – Quick access to their own caseload

#3: For Marketers

Before building my custom marketer Home page, I created a few reports: Campaigns with Opportunities (by Amount), and Leads by Source. See this post for more on creating marketing reports. Notes: In order to add charts to a custom homepage, you must create them in Classic and save them with a chart, and they cannot be saved in the Personal Reports folder. Then switch to Lightning and build your page!

What do marketers care about?

They care about tracking their marketing efforts – incoming leads, how many of those leads are getting converted into opportunities, and what’s coming up on their busy calendar. Marketers also constantly check what is getting published, so we want to make it easy for them to get to outlets and resources with one click. Let’s give them an easy way to see all this information as soon as they login to Salesforce.

• Jumbotron (Jumbotron from Silverline from the Component Exchange): Use a custom logo, tagline, and link button to live material
• Report Chart: Leads by Source – track how your marketing efforts are doing across all channels
• Report Chart: Campaigns with Opportunities – measure the value of your marketing efforts
• Upcoming Events: Be ready for what’s coming next in the day
• Rich Text: Add an inspirational message, and custom links to commonly visited resources Filtered List: Active Campaigns – stay on top of current activities

Easy peasy, right?

These are just a few examples of what you can do with custom Home pages, but there are so many more possibilities. When planning custom homepages for your users, remember to think about these three questions:

1. What does this user care about?
2. Where does this user spend most of their time?
3. How can I make it quicker for this user to find what they need?

Now go build some of your own custom home pages! We want to see what you’re building for your users, so share your screenshots with us on the Success Community using #mycustomhome. You never know, there might be some #AwesomeAdmin swag rewards for sharing & inspiring others with your creations…

Resources:

Sales Cloud: Customize Home Page – Release Readiness LIVE, Summer ’16 – YouTube