Lightning Now Tour for Admins with Eric Jacobson

Today we’re at the Lightning Now Tour in Houston to talk about Salesforce project managers, and we had an opportunity to speak with Eric Jacobson between his many presentations. Eric is the Senior Director of Platform Product Management at Salesforce and his mission is to bring Lightning to Admins. He will share with us what the Lightning Now Tour is all about, he’ll explain how easy the transition to Lightning is, and he’ll also give tips to help you prepare to roll it out to your organization.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Eric Jacobson.

What is the Lightning Now Tour?

The Lightning Now Tour is not so much about marketing information, but more about helping customers understand Lightning. The idea is to discuss in-depth what the philosophy behind Lightning is. Admins will get an opportunity to see the road map of where Lightning is at right now, to where it will be going in the future. “We decided to create an event to get hands-on with our customers to help them take that big step,” Eric says.

A lot of Salesforce customers had heard about Lightning, they had seen pictures, and they knew what Lightning was, but they were missing the necessary steps to enable themselves to go from being aware of Lightning to actually turning it on in their organizations.

Eric explains that the event goes deep into the hands-on experience of going from Classic to Lightning. “We talk about all the great capabilities that you have now in Lightning, that you’ve never had in classic. We also discuss techniques and strategies for moving from Classic into Lightning.” He goes on to describe that they “ask you to bring your laptops and we give you an organization where you can start to bring that organization from Classic into Lightning.”

Don’t be afraid of Lightning.

“This is one of the few opportunities where you get to have hands-on experience with the Lightning product and evangelist team. You’re getting a close connection with us and are then able not just to hear where we’re going from a roadmap perspective, but also to ask the questions that are burning in the back of your mind. You’ll also get to try it with the support of a team ready to look over your shoulder to help you through those questions,” says Eric.

A lot of people attend the Lightning Now Tour, and it is a wonderful networking event.

“Every participant that comes is doing an exercise. You are doing the equivalent of a Trailhead trail live with us in the room, so you’ll earn a Trailhead badge that is only available if you come to the Lightning tour.”

Run the Lightning Readiness Check.

Before coming to the tour, Eric encourages everyone to assess the organization that they have right now. “We have a great tool for that. Not everyone knows this, but we have a Lightning Readiness Check. Even if you haven’t moved to Lightning yet, from setup, there is a tool there that will basically let you assess your readiness to move to Lightning. It gives you a nice PDF report. Run that report, read through it, and it will give you some idea as to where you are today and things that you might need to look at. There’s a variety of modules that we’ll encourage you to look at, but ideally, everyone will go on to do the whole Migrating to Lightning trail — that’s the real way to do it!”

For more insights, make sure to follow Eric on Twitter (@esjacob).

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