Salesforce Administrator Beginner - Lightning Experience

An app is a collection of items that work together to serve a particular function. In Lightning Experience, Lightning apps give your users access to sets of objects, tabs, and other items all in one convenient bundle in the navigation bar.

Lightning apps let you brand your apps with a custom color and logo. You can even include a utility bar and Lightning page tabs in your Lightning app. Members of your org can work more efficiently by easily switching between apps. What’s most important to sales reps? Accounts, events, and organizations. How about sales managers? Reports and dashboards make the top of the list.

So what things can you put in a Lightning app?

• Most standard objects, including Home, the main Chatter feed, Groups, and People
• Your org’s custom objects
• Visualforce tabs
• Lightning component tabs
• Canvas apps via Visualforce tabs
• Web tabs

You can even include Lightning page tabs and utilities like Lightning Voice. If your org uses utility features, you can enable a utility bar in your app that allows instant access to productivity tools, like integrated voice, in the Lightning Experience footer.

You can also build your own on-demand apps by grouping items into new custom apps.

To switch between apps, users can use the App Launcher. This makes it easy for users to switch contexts and still have access to the items, objects, and pages they need most.

The App Manager is your go-to place for managing apps for Lightning Experience. It shows all your connected apps and Salesforce apps.

Use the Lightning Experience App Manager to:

• View all your Salesforce apps.
• Create Lightning apps or connected apps (1).
• See which apps are visible in Lightning Experience (2).
• Easily manage apps (3).

Click a column header to sort the list based on that column.

You can see in the App Manager that there are two types of apps: Classic and Lightning. A checkmark in the Visible in Lightning column means that the app is accessible in Lightning Experience via the App Launcher and is fully functional. Classic apps marked as visible in Lightning Experience are fully usable in Lightning Experience, but they don’t take advantage of the app enhancements that Lightning Experience offers.

Did you know that app images for Lightning apps can be animated GIFs? Oh yes, they can. You're welcome.

It’s time for the fun part: deciding how to set up Lightning apps for your users. Here are some tips for planning Lightning apps for your org.

Talk to your users. Ask them what their priorities are. Customizing tabs in apps gives you a unique opportunity to engage with your users. Each group of users has its own priorities. Find out which objects and items represent their highest priorities.

• Ask users to post feedback to a Chatter group.
• Publish polls.
• Schedule lunch sessions. Everyone likes a free lunch, and nearly everybody is happy to express their opinion.

Create a master list of objects that everyone in your org wants. Then trim down the list for each group—sales reps, sales managers, execs, and so on. The menus for every user group share some common objects, like Home, Tasks, and Feed. Keep the high-priority items for each group at the top. Put low-priority items at the bottom, or remove them altogether. Users can always go to the App Launcher to get the items they use less often.

List views are a way for you to browse a select set of records in Salesforce. When you click an object tab, you see a list of the records associated with that object. Every user can create their own custom list views for their own needs.

In list views you see only the data that you have access to. You see records that you own or have read or write access to, and records shared with you. List views also include records owned by or shared with users in roles below you in the role hierarchy.

You can collapse and expand the filter pane by clicking . You can change who can see the list view by clicking  and selecting Sharing Settings.

You can edit record fields directly from within a list view. Editable cells display a pencil icon () when you hover over the cell, while non-editable cells display a lock icon ().

List view charts help you visualize your list view data. The aggregate type specifies how the field data is calculated: by sum, count, or average. The aggregate field specifies the type of data to calculate. The grouping field labels the chart segments.

When you create a list view chart for an object, such as Opportunities or Leads, the chart is associated with the object. The chart is available for any list view that you have permission to see for that object, except the Recently Viewed list.

Compact layouts control which fields your users see in the highlights panel at the top of a record. Compact layouts also control the fields that appear in the expanded lookup card you see when you hover over a link in record details.

Compact layouts help make your team more productive by presenting them with the key record information so they can easily manage their work. For example, show phone numbers and regions on an account. Or, show stages, amounts, and ownership fields on an opportunity. With compact layouts, you can highlight whatever your users need to see at a glance when they look at a record.

Compact layouts also control how records display in the Salesforce1 mobile app. If your company uses Salesforce1, you’ll also help your users see what they need on mobile screens, where space is limited and quick recognition of records is important.

There are two ways to customize a page in Lightning Experience. You can customize a page’s layout, or customize its contents. These are done with separate tools.

Lightning pages are a collection of Lightning components arranged in regions on the page. You can customize the layout of the page and the position of its components with the Lightning App Builder (learn more in the Lightning App Builder module right here on Trailhead).

You can customize a page’s contents, such as the fields and buttons that appear on the page, by using a different tool called the page layout editor. The page layout editor, also known as page layouts, helps you manage the content of pages in both our Classic UI and in Lightning Experience. The page layout editor is what we’ll be working with in this unit.

The page layout editor lets you:

• Control which fields, lists of related records, and custom links users see
• Customize the order that the fields appear in the page details
• Determine whether fields are visible, read only, or required
• Control which standard and custom buttons appear on records and related lists
• Control which quick actions appear on the page

Customizing the fields on your record pages is easy, and you can do it with just a few clicks. The Enhanced Page Layout Editor is the go-to place for customizing a Lightning Experience record page’s fields and related lists. It’s called “enhanced” because there’s an earlier version of it. We’ll just refer to it as the page layout editor here.

The page layout editor has two basic parts: a palette on the upper portion of the screen (1) and the record’s page layout on the lower portion of the screen (2). The palette contains the basic elements—such as fields, actions, buttons, links, and related lists—that you can add and arrange on your page. 

The Highlights Panel section in the page layout editor controls the highlights panel on pages in our Classic UI. It’s of no use to us in Lightning Experience.

Wondering what the icons mean to the left of some of the field labels?

• ―The field must have a value to save the record, but isn’t required on the page layout itself.
• ―The field must be included on the page layout because either an administrator configured the field as universally required or Salesforce automatically requires the field. Although you can’t remove such fields, you can move them to different locations.
• ―The field is a controlling field.
• ―The field is a dependent field.
• ―The field is read only.

You can assign page layouts to different user profiles. For example, you can create a customized page layout for managers and another page layout for standard users. To change page layout assignments, click Page Layout Assignment and then click Edit Assignment.

Custom links can link to an external URL, such as www.google.com, a Visualforce page, or your company’s intranet. Custom buttons can connect users to external applications, such as web pages, and launch custom links.

You can choose the display window properties that determine how the target of a link or button is displayed to your users. Custom links can include Salesforce fields as tokens within the URL. For example, you can include an account name in a URL that searches Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p={!Account_Name}.

If you want the button or link to launch a custom page or other code, consider a Visualforce page.

In Lightning Experience, custom buttons and links live on your page layouts and appear in different areas of a Lightning page.

There are three primary types of custom buttons and links that you can create.

• List button—Appears on a related list on an object record page.
• Detail page link—Appears in the Links section of the record details on an object record page.
• Detail page button—Appears in the action menu in the highlights panel of a record page.

For each type, you must define the action that occurs when a user clicks it.
A custom list button is a button that you can add to a related list. When you create a list button for an object, you can add that button to that object’s related list when it appears on other objects.

Actions let your users quickly do tasks, such as create records, log calls, send emails, and more. With custom actions, you can make your users’ navigation and workflow as smooth as possible by giving them quick access to information that’s most important.
When thinking about what actions you might want to create, ask your users what they really wish they could do. For example, you might create an Emergency Order action for your food service company that allows delivery drivers to immediately order extra or missing food items. Creating actions that your users need can drive adoption in your organization and make you a hero to your users!
Quick actions come in two different flavors:

Object-specific actions

Object-specific actions have automatic relationships to other records and let users quickly create or update records, log calls, send emails, and more, in the context of a particular object. For example, you add an object-specific action on the Account object that creates contacts. If a user creates a contact with that action on the detail page for the Acme account, that new contact is automatically associated with Acme. Object-specific actions live on the page layout for the object.

There are several types of object-specific actions.

• Object-specific create actions create records that are automatically associated with related records.
• Object-specific update actions make it easy for users to edit records. You can define the fields that are available for update.
• Object-specific Log a Call actions let users enter notes about calls, meetings, or other interactions that are related to a specific record.
• Object-specific custom actions invoke Lightning components, Visualforce pages, or canvas apps that let users interact with or create records that have a relationship to an object record. If you’re new to Visualforce, don’t worry. You can learn all about it in another module. For now, remember that Visualforce pages allow you to do really cool customizations in your actions.
• Send email actions, available only on cases, give users access to a simplified version of the Case Feed Email action on Salesforce1.

Global actions

You create global actions in a different place in Setup than you create object-specific actions. They’re called global actions because they can be put anywhere actions are supported. Use global actions to let users log call details, create or update records, or send email, all without leaving the page they’re on.

Global actions live on a special layout of their own, known as the global publisher layout. It isn’t associated with an object, and it populates the global actions menu in Lightning Experience. Users can access the global actions menu by clicking  in the Salesforce header.

If an object page layout isn’t customized with actions, then the actions on those object record pages are inherited from the global publisher layout.

There are more types of actions than just these two, but some of them aren’t customizable. We’re going to explore only object-specific and global actions in this unit.

You might see actions referred to as “quick actions” in Salesforce. It’s true, they’re quick and your users will love them. The quick part is just a category and means that the action is either object-specific or global and not some other kind of Salesforce action.

After you create the action, you can customize its layout using the action layout editor. It’s like the page layout editor but for actions. With the action layout editor, you can customize the fields the users must populate to complete the action.

Just like the page layout editor, the upper part of the action layout editor contains a palette, and below it is the action layout. The palette contains fields from the action’s target object that you can add to the action layout.

Each field on this action layout has a red asterisk, indicating that it’s a required field. Required fields are added to an action layout by default when you create the action. If you remove a required field from an action layout, then users can’t successfully complete the action. 

There are two actions sections on a page layout. The Quick Actions in the Salesforce Classic Publisher section controls which actions appear on record pages in the Salesforce Classic UI. The Salesforce1 and Lightning Experience Actions section controls which actions appear on record pages in both Lightning Experience and in Salesforce1.

If you don’t customize the action sections of a page layout, then the actions you see in Salesforce1 and Lightning Experience come from a set of default actions defined by Salesforce.

Global actions live on a special layout of their own, known as the global publisher layout. The global publisher layout populates the global actions menu. Click  to check out the global actions menu.