Revisiting Chatter in Lightning Experience

When you become accustomed to (cough, entrenched in, cough) the rules of engagement for your organization’s tools, there’s always a little frisson of horror when those rules change. It’s like turning in your well-worn, comfy shoes for a stiff, shiny pair.

Thus is the phenomenon of resisting Chatter in Lightning Experience for the (once) more fully-featured and familiar version in Salesforce Classic. But, it’s time to take another look.

A Big Reduction in Context Switching

For example, let’s talk about context switching, that huge time suck that has us entering five different modes to accomplish one task. How does Classic compare to Lightning Experience?

Imagine that you created a slide deck for a new marketing campaign. Your team’s graphic artist also gave you three amazing campaign images. You want to post the slide deck and images to the Marketing group.

So the score is: Classic four posts, 33 steps; Lightning Experience one post, seven steps. Lightning Experience offers a unified publishing experience that vastly reduces context switching by supporting multiple publisher actions in one flow.

A More Functional Chatter Home

Let’s see how the Chatter home in Classic compares to the same in Lightning Experience. Both offer lists of recommendations and trending topics, both give you access to follow, mention, and bookmark feeds. Classic pulls ahead with easy access to muted feed items. But Lightning Experience leaps out front when you compare its Einstein-driven Company Highlights feed with Classic’s All Company.

Company Highlights is an Einstein feature that tracks the feeds you have access to and determines the posts with the most engagement—things like likes, comments, and views—to serve up the freshest posts that are generating the most interest. Company Highlights ensures that you see the posts that everyone in your company is talking about. You’ll never miss important updates and popular topics again!

Combined Feeds Through Streams

Continuing our Chatter page comparison: only Lightning Experience offers streams. Streams are combinations of selected feeds that you curate for your needs. As of the Summer ’17 release, you can create 100 streams, and you can add all kinds of feeds to a stream. Add feeds from profiles, work records, accounts—all kinds.

Streams can trigger email notifications that tell you when a feed that is included in one of your streams is updated. Remember when we said you could add all kinds of objects to a stream? Well, by adding Cases or Opportunities—or any of the objects that haven’t up-to-now offered notifications—to a stream, you are also now getting notifications for updates to those object’s feeds.

Use streams to create different feed combinations that help you keep track of everything related to a specific business area, project, team, topic, or anything else you need to stay updated on.

Lightning Fast Navigation to Your Most Frequently Visited Groups

Another useful, Lightning Experience-only feature on the Chatter home page is the list of most recently visited groups. Click a listed group to get right to it instead of navigating away from the Chatter tab and to the Groups tab, which you’d have to do in Classic. The list supports up to five entries, which change as your visiting habits change.

A Better Search Experience

Lightning Experience search also compares favorably to Classic. In both, you can search globally. Hurrah! But only in Lightning Experience can you limit your search to a feed. Search in Lightning Experience offers a faster and smarter way to find the information you’re looking for. Do you want to blaze the trail? Use search to navigate the trail.

Since we’re talking about searching, we must mention topics. Until now a Classic-only feature, topics debuts in Lightning Experience in Summer ’17. Put a hashtag in front of a term you want to search for later, like #this. Search for “this” and pull up all content tagged this way.

Lightning Experience global search also offers a really cool feature: enter the name of an object type in the global search field, like People, to see an option for limiting this search to just that type of object.

Once you’ve set the scope of the global search, enter your search term and run it. You can also sort your Chatter results by relevance. Run your search, select Chatter, and sort by Top Posts.

How’s our comparison going? I’m not sure of the exact number of pro’s, but I think Lightning Experience is pulling way ahead!

A More Robust Sharing Model

There’s a big difference in how posts are shared in Classic versus Lightning Experience. When you share a post in Classic, the post is copied; no connection is sustained between the original post and its shared version. In Lightning Experience, a shared post retains its connection to the original. So, for example, if the original is edited, those changes appear in the shared version, too. Way to keep the content experience consistent, Lightning Experience!

More Features in Lightning Experience Groups

How about groups? There’s a lot of great engagement information in both Lightning Experience and Classic. But only Lightning Experience offers a tile view of your groups with a quick window into useful group information, like your group status, the group’s access type (public or private), its owner, membership count, and the last time someone was active in the group. You can join and navigate to the group right from the tile.

Einstein makes another appearance in Lightning Experience through group membership recommendations. Behind the scenes, a social graph tracks things like who likes the same things you do, comments on the same posts, follows the same people. These statistics lead to an informed guess about who might also be interested in the same groups that you’re a member of.

Live Feeds! Live!

We mustn’t forget to mention that only in Lightning Experience do groups offer live feeds, where push updates make posts appear in the feed in real time. No more browser refreshes to see the latest information. In Lightning Experience all comments are live (not just comments in groups), there’s even a “who’s typing” feature that shows you who’s writing a comment.

A New Focus on One Voice

Here’s a little amuse bouche: Profile feeds offer a “Posted by This User” sorting option. It lets you see just the posts that that user posted. It’s on your own profile, too. Is this feature also available in Classic? Nope! It’s Lightning Experience only.

So give Chatter in Lightning Experience another look. But first, brace yourself for all the awesome.