Be a Builder: Leverage App Builder to Deliver Innovation Webinar Recap

To kick off the Be a Builder adventure this spring we hosted a webinar called Be a Builder! Leverage App Builder to Deliver Innovation.

We went in-depth on how Admins can leverage the power of the App Builder to deliver innovation at their companies. Salesforce VP of Product Management Eric Jacobsen, and Varex Imaging customer Michael White teamed up to bring Admins up to speed on the latest updates and new features coming to App Builder, and show us a real-life example of how you can use it to create business-changing solutions for your company.

Take a look at the recording:

Webinar summary:

App Builder Highlights for Summer ’18

Eric Jacobsen jumped right in by speaking about his favorite new customization features for Lightning pages and components: Accordion component, pinned workspace regions, and paused flow interview components. These features pack in efficiency and make Admins’ lives easier. Then, he dove into Dynamic Lightning Pages. Dynamic Lightning Pages came out a few releases ago, but remains an Admin favorite. The capability of this feature is expanded now for Summer ’18 to include all page types, with different contexts!

Eric highlights the arrival of App Builder becoming a holistic app building tool by integrating app settings. The best part? You can now edit multiple pages without ever leaving App Builder! Be sure to watch the recording for Eric’s awesome demo where he goes through these tools in real-time.

Apps to Replace Manual Processes

Next, Michael White from Varex Imaging shares his App Builder use case. The company has a small team of two Admins and one Developer who support more than 200 users across sales, marketing, and service with their Salesforce instance. Mike and team switched Lightning on for all users in early 2017. Now all new projects take a Lightning-focused approach in order to continue adoption and proficiency.

Michael explains that there were many hidden challenges along the move to Lightning and full adoption of Salesforce. One of the largest being the dependency that Varex had on managing certain processes by spreadsheet and printed paper! Those spreadsheets or printed documents would be transferred from one department to another, leading to a lack of visibility and, in turn, difficulty meeting customer expectations. Michael says that one of the main questions they tackled was how to bring this manual, paper system into a powerful tool they already had—Salesforce. They asked many other questions too, like: What kind of functionality was available to make this process easier? Is it possible for exec teams to keep oversight as well as approve requests without passing papers back and forth.? Could automation options be leveraged for approval processes? Could Reports and Dashboards be used to track engagement points around key dates for a product?

What Michael and his team found was that there were many solutions available to enable the team to leverage Salesforce against these pain points. Features that Admins are already familiar with and could layer together, allowing them to create a robust Salesforce solution that simplifies business processes. Michael’s demo then explained how other teams can recreate these steps and implement a Lightning flow that streamlined outdated processes at Varex. He recommends implementing the path component in the custom object based on the lifecycle data (if you have it). This will help your users better understand what is happening through every step.

For Michael and his team, the benefits of using Lightning-enabled features were numerous. For example: they were able to simplify their data collection and record creation. They were also able to fine-tune record pages using Lightning App Builder to show key information first. Additionally, component visibility allows Admins to surface the appropriate data at the right time.

How Can You Be a Builder, too?

Admins can leverage the power of the App Builder with these new features available in the Summer ’18 release! Learning on Trailhead by taking the Be a Builder trailmix and completing the App Customization Specialist Superbadge will help you skill up!

Be sure to tweet us your progress, questions, and successes with hashtag #beabuilder.