I recently attended a packed room at the Lightning Now Tour as it did a return visit to Boston. I missed the first Boston tour date as I was in Atlanta for Southeast Dreamin’.

I know it’s difficult to carve out two days from your work schedule to attend a two day workshop, but this is worth the time. I recommend this for companies who are still on Classic and looking to migrate to Lightning. You also have access to members of the Lightning product team. Plus, this is FREE!  Did I mention it was FREE?!

The first day started with an overall overview of Lightning Experience, with feature highlights from a sales and service perspective, a walkthrough of the Lightning Report Builder along with a preview of Lightning roadmap. After lunch, we were given an overview of the Lightning customization, including the use of the Lightning App Builder. To close the day, Salesforce discussed the use of Accelerators to assist with the migration to Lightning, the running of the Lightning Readiness Report, scheduling a consultation, what you need to consider, prepare and plan for your successful Lightning rollout.

We rolled up our sleeves on Day 2 with hands on Lightning customization declaratively as well as what it would take to take your visualforce page, move it into Lightning and turn it into a Lightning component.

Ok, for the administrators in the house, do not let your fear of code scare you from the latter half of Day 2. If you can copy and paste, you can create a lightning component. While you may not be the one developing lightning components in your org, please do not let that be the roadblock for you to understand what lightning components are, how they work, what they can do, understand what it takes to convert a visualforce page to lightning using the SLDS tags and in a few weeks, how you can reference the lightningstylesheet tag (beta) in Winter 18. Also, learn how you can create a lightning component and show it in Classic using Lightning Out. Knowledge is power. The more you know, the more valuable you are to your company.

While I have completed all the Trailhead content, it was a good refresher for me and in fact, I thought the information sunk in better with Salesforce experts teaching us in person the declarative and development Lightning customization using Trailhead projects as hands on exercises. Kelly Walker led the declarative hands on using the Trailhead project Improve Your Classic App by Moving It to Lightning Experience.  She was very knowledgable on the topic. We were so fortunate to have Greg Rewis, the Trailhead project developer, talk through his process of creating the code used for Build Flexible Apps with Visualforce Pages and Lightning Components programmatic hands on exercise.  He was very passionate about the topic, very engaging and did a great job explaining the concepts to us, breaking them up into consumable bites.

I definitely felt by the end of the workshop that I now had a better understanding of what is capable in Lightning declaratively and programmatically and can see myself using this information to improve the Lightning orgs we have now and things to be aware of when we do make that migration from Classic to Lightning.

Thank you, Marc Benioff and Parker Harris, for bringing these workshops to various cities worldwide to spread the word about Lightning and how companies can make the move from Classic to Lightning Experience. I do hope that Salesforce will continue to bring this workshop to the community.

So, if you haven’t attended one already and if you see a city near you listed on the tour, I really encourage you to register and attend the full two day workshop, regardless of your role.

https://developer.salesforce.com/events/workshops/lightning-now