Salesforce Lightning top tips: from Kanban to integrated email

21st January 2021 by James Burgess in Salesforce
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A throwback to Winter 2017, Salesforce had just introduced a few of its most important Lightning features. In 2021, we dug out our top tips from the time, as they’re still useful to read about and make sure you’re getting the most out of Salesforce Lightning. In this blog, we covered Kanban view, merging leads, Lightning Voice (now Lightning Dialer) and integrated email.

Kanban View

Until 2017, this view was only available for Opportunities. However, as a well-received element of Lightning Experience, Salesforce opened up the feature to Leads, Campaigns and Contacts. See the screenshot from Salesforce’s help guides:

Identifying and Merging Leads

Following the introduction of Salesforce’s own duplicate management tool in Spring ‘15, they made further enhancements to this with the “Potential Duplicates” Panel. The feature is completely automated and presents potential dupes on the Lead viewing screen, without the need to search! Of course, this is all fully customisable and administrators are able to define what constitutes a match.

Check out the example below:

Clicking “View All” presents each matching Lead:

Comparing the records gives the opportunity to merge:

Lightning Voice (now Lightning Dialer)

Computer telephony integration (CTI) apps within the Salesforce ecosystem started seeing notable success before 2015. This encouraged Salesforce to introduce their own tool in 2016, Lightning Voice. This tool lets users make phone calls with their keyboard or the on-screen dialer. It removes the requirement for records to have a phone number associated. It also grants access to call history and forwards calls to the sales reps’ mobile phone.

Integrated Email

Since 2017, users have been able to take advantage of several features:

• Using Enhanced Email, you can send emails straight from Salesforce and appear in your outbox in Office365 & Gmail.
• Lightning for Outlook brings further customisation to the Salesforce user experience within Outlook. It allows components to be swapped in and out, depending on user needs.
• Lightning for Gmail was just getting started at this point, with calendar syncing being introduced. Since then, the integration has become as comprehensive as the Outlook integration.

In Winter ’21, Lightning Sync was replaced by Einstein Activity Capture to sync contacts and events between Microsoft® or Google applications and Salesforce. Read more about the comparisons between these two features to understand the value of Einstein Activity Capture.

Navigation UI

These features were introduced in 2017 but it’s worth noting them today, as they are just as useful to be aware of:

• An app launcher on the nav bar allows easy searching across the two “Apps” and “Items” menus.
• Each object in the nav menu has a shortcut menu to provide quick access to key functionality and lists.
• You can brand each individual app – handy, no doubt, for a bit of managed package branding!

Additional features you should be aware of in Lightning

• Switch to month view in the calendar
• You can conduct mass actions on list views

• You have the option to specify an app as a “Classic App”. Whilst all existing apps appear in both Lightning Experience and Classic, creating a new classic app will need to have the “Show in Lightning Experience” option selected.

• It is also possible, from the Lightning app manager, to upgrade an app from classic to Lightning. The result of which gives 2 available apps:

• This allows administrators to customise the apps individually. Meaning any tabs which might be fully functional in Classic and not Lightning (or vice versa!), can be easily removed from one app, without impacting the other.
• Record pages can be customised on a “Per App” basis. This feature allows layouts to be specified based on app, record type and profile, for more precise control over content.
• Tooltips have now been enabled on Lightning Experience record pages, granting access to the admin’s field level hints & tips

Summary

It’s great to see so many features being bundled into each release. We at BrightGen always use the new additions quickly and easily. If you haven’t migrated to Salesforce Lightning yet, take a look at our Lightning migration service. We can get you there in about a month!

Stay on top of Salesforce releases on a quarterly basis by listening into our webinars with Keir Bowden giving you the highlights.