Admins Move to Lightning in 2017

At the beginning of this year, many Admins were just starting to dig into Lightning Experience. You made it your New Year’s resolution to learn, you started talking to your stakeholders, and you joined us on a journey to discover, roll out and optimize Lightning. Because ultimately, as an #AwesomeAdmin you knew Lightning is the future and it is up to you to lead your company into the future!

Let’s journey through time and look at some of the big steps you took:

You learned about awesome new features

You joined Admin Evangelists Gillian Bruce and LeeAnne Rimel every release to learn about new Lightning features for Admins and end users. If you missed it, here’s the Winter 18 Release Readiness live for Admins recording.

You also learned the powers of Lightning App Builder in our webinar about customizing Lightning – a great resource for understanding the basic building blocks of Lightning. Then you got hands-on with Trailhead.

You got inspired by fellow #AwesomeAdmins rolling out Lightning

Over 18 Admins stepped in front of the camera to share Lightning success stories and inspire your peers.

Even moar of you joined the Salesforce Admins podcast to tell your story.

You learned how to make the switch from Classic to Lightning

In many cities around the world, you joined us and your Salesforce Admin peers at the Lightning Now Tour to learn about making the switch from Classic to Lightning. And, to keep the learning going we put it into a Trailhead Project for you to complete.

You provided tips for change management

Moving to Lightning is more than just adding a new feature and telling your users about it. Managing this transition at your company meant developing a rollout plan that ensured all users were bought-in, trained and enabled to use Lightning. So you learned a lot about change management first hand! Here are some great resources you created for your peers:

Lightning Success: Taking Your Migration By Storm DF17 Admin track
Considerations for a Phased Approach to Your Lightning Rollout blog post
Dear Salesforce Admin, You are a Project Manager blog post
Migrating to Lightning Experience from Classic blog post

You checked off items on your Lightning checklists

September was “Month of Lightning” and Admins all over shared lots of best practices, tips, and resources on moving to Lightning.

You followed weekly checklists to discover, roll out and optimize Lightning.

You got psyched about Lightning features

You shared your favorite Lightning features on Twitter during Favorite Feature Day.

You broke record attendance at Kristi Guzman’s “Get Nerdy with Lightning Experience Page Layouts” Lightning webinar.

You learned how Salesforce launched Lightning internally

Salesforce moved all its employees to Lightning Experience earlier this year. It was an exciting journey that we thought would be helpful to share with you. We talked to the admins on the Salesforce IT team to understand how they went through the process of enabling Lightning Experience and boiled it down to 7 steps.

If you haven’t checked it out, take a look to learn tips on communicating your rollout plan, analyzing your org, and getting hands-on with tools, videos, and apps along the way!

2018 and beyond

Admins accomplished a lot this past year in leading their company to the future with Lightning. And, you are blazing incredible new trails with Lightning Experience every day: building new apps, automating businesses, and creating new careers. It’s awesome. Next year we will continue to release new Lightning features as well as bring classic features over. Check the roadmap for details. We’re also excited to make things like myLightning (which we demoed in the DF17 Admin Keynote) available to everybody!

But, most importantly, we look forward to seeing what you achieve with Lightning in 2018!