Why Lightning with Michael Orr

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Michael Orr, the Senior Director in charge of Lightning Adoption at Salesforce.

Join us to learn about why Lightning is all about action, the magic of quick actions, and the new excited changes that are coming down the pipe with the Winter release.

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

The Lightning Tour

Michael became a Salesforce Admin twelve years ago, “and I’ve been administrating something ever since.” However, for the last two years he’s been working on Lightning, and now he’s focused on helping Salesforce customers get everything they can out of Lightning.

“Building Lightning is like a rebirth of the product in many ways; we get to rethink and redesign all the pieces of the product that have been there for so long.” During the process of doing all that, Michael’s hit the road touring and talking to customers with the Lightning Tour. Getting feedback is an invaluable part of the process, and “some parts of it they almost know better than we do.” They’ve done over 40 cities so far, with more on the way. As Michael says, “we don’t have to guess what’s important to people, they tell us.”

The Lightning Tour is especially useful when the local user group shows up, because they ask some of the best questions. The happy hours and other user group event are especially memorable and fun because “we get to meet all the people that we interact with virtually in the flesh in different cities around the world.”

The Magic of Quick Actions

When Michael was on tour on the East Coast, they were asking people whether they had used quick actions or created a global quick action, but to his surprise few had actually played around with that feature. It can save your users a lot of time, so it’s one of Michael’s biggest Lightning pro tips.

In Lightning, quick actions are preconfigured actions, created declaratively, that let you do something like create a record with preset defaults. They were originally created for a feed-based design, “but in Lightning we’ve jailbroken that feature.” You can put a quick action in the header bar, or in the global header, so you can have access to quick actions no matter where you are. This lets you do an action while you’re working on something else, “which makes Salesforce a lot more like an operating system in the cloud.”

So Why Lightning?

If you have Classic and it’s working, why switch? Classic was amazing and innovative for it’s time, and as Michael says, “If we rewind the clock ten years, the idea of being able to just put data in the cloud and not worry about it was pretty revolutionary.” That was ten years ago, however, and it’s time for something new.

The real shift from Classic to Lightning is a shift in mentality. Instead of being focused on record keeping, where it was all about the huge amounts of data you were saving to to the cloud where it will be safe, the focus in Lightning is on actions. The goal is to “allow the user to first of all really see and understand what’s most important about a particular thing that they’re working with, and then take action quickly and have those actions accessible to the end user.”

Trying to enable action isn’t just about the end user, it’s also about the Admin. You can configure things that you could never touch before. As Michael says, “You can create experiences that are tailored to a specific role or profile in ways that you couldn’t in Classic.” With the new design changes coming in the Winter release, it’s a great time to switch.

For more insights, make sure to follow Michael on Twitter (@orrdeal)

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