Package: Recruiting(JS2)

Jobscience and Lightning

Overview and FAQs

As a Jobscience customer you are aware by now of the new user experience known as Lightning. Despite all the talk, is not clear for most of our customers:

What the impact will be to their existing Classic implementation
What it takes to move my company to Lightning
When if ever the existing classic experience will become unavailable

This article is designed to answer the most common questions and provide some guidance for existing customers of Jobscience.

What is Lightning Exactly?

Lightning is both a new user experience and a new technology for customizing Salesforce.

The new user experience has been designed to reduce the clicks and scrolling required to navigate to the information you need. This includes using sub-tabs on detail pages to reduce the need for endless scrolling. Sub-tabs act like sections and/or related lists from the previous pages layouts. It is now possible to organize in the order recruiters want to see.

The new technology makes it easier to build enhance and extend components and pages in the solution to meet your needs. The new drag and drop tools like the component builder are more powerful than the old page layout editor. It will enable your admins as well as Jobscience to build better user interfaces with Clicks and not Code. In this new world Jobscience will be able to build components that you can drop on to pages that you build yourself.

Why would we want to switch?

In the near term, the main reason to switch is mostly spelled out above. Less Clicks and faster access to the information users want.

In the longer term, you will find that many of the new features introduced by Salesforce and Jobscience will only be available in Lightning Experience.

A good example of this today is the Card Sort view for lists. Salesforce now makes it possible to create a list view of records, grouped by any picklist on the page, such that you can drag and drop the "cards" into different stages, complete with any automation that fires because of the state change. This is an out of the box feature that is only available in Lighting Experience.

Jobscience has invested development effort on creating new page layouts for lighting and has begun developing new lightning components. Over the next year, we expect most of our new features will be optimized for Lightning and in some cases only work in lightning.

Do I have to switch by a certain date?

There currently is no date by which time Classic Edition will be unsupported. The last time Salesforce made this type of change it was several years before they deprecated the old User Experience.

In fact, Salesforce has not yet completed support for Lightning the technology. Jobscience has been briefed by Salesforce on the timing for these final features. The Summer 17 release from Salesforce will fill in many of the gaps and the final base components for Lightning are expected in Winter 18. We believe that the first complete implementation of Lightning will not be available until late in 2017.

Companies that wish to switch now will find a robust user interface that is already better than the classic edition. Customer who can wait until early 2018 will enjoy a more complete product where all workarounds are no longer required.

Our best estimate is that while you should be planning to migrate late 2017 or early 2018, you should be able to use Classic mode until well in to 2020; since Salesforce has not announced this date, it is our current best estimate based on experiences with past updates.

Can I keep my existing customizations?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that types of customizations will impact the practicality of keeping them.

Lightning is a user experience so changes to the Schema (custom fields and objects) and Process Automation (workflow or Apex triggers) will be unaffected. The major impact to your current customizations will be page layouts, custom buttons, and any custom Visualforce components.

Visualforce pages are still supported but the new standard page layouts are quite a change over the previous layouts and so most of your work will be designing and building your pages. As mentioned above, the new layout editors and component builders should provide the tools you need to include your custom fields and buttons, but you should expect that this migration will be a re-deign to get the most out of the new capabilities.

Our recommendation is to review our new Lightning page layouts and consider using these as the basis for your changes. In other words, just as you started with our classic page layouts to make your previous changes, consider starting fresh from our new Lighting page layouts and make your changes to these new pages.

Can I move some users to lightning and keep others on classic?

The technical answer is yes, but our recommendation is to move everyone if possible. There are challenges in the Spring '17 edition than can be worked around with Visualforce components, but when you override a tab, you override for all.

Can our admins make the change by themselves?

Perhaps if they have deep Salesforce experience and they have completed Lightning certifications on the Salesforce Trailhead. Our recommendation is that at a minimum you should discuss your situation with our professional services team to determine how feasible this is given your level of customization.

Can Jobscience help us migrate?

Our professional services team is quite capable of helping you through the process and in fact we recommend this option.

What will it cost if Jobscience does the migration?

This depends on the level of customization and any additional changes you might want to make along the way.

We offer a two-day evaluation and recommendation for your setup for a fee

We expect most typical conversions will require an additional 3-5 days of professional services time to implement the required changes -- this will attract an additional professional services cost.

Let us know if you would like to consider the new Lightning experience for your organization!

What are the differences and considerations I should review?

Here is a great resource to review what will change with your Salesforce setup and considerations:

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=lex_aloha_comparison.htm&type=0