Never satisfied to rest on their unquestionably well-earned laurels, Salesforce continues its relentless drive for innovation with Lighting, its top-to-bottom revamp of its customer experience approach.
Defining Lightning is challenging, as it consists of a broad collection of tools and technologies that represent a significant upgrade to the Salesforce platform. Included in Lightning are the following:
- Lightning Experience – a set of modern user interfaces (UIs), including UIs for the Salesforce1 Mobile app and template-based communities
- Lightning Component Framework – a JavaScript framework along with a set of components that developers can use to customize the Lightning Experience
- Visual Building Tools – tools that provide drag-and-drop simplicity for app building and customizations
- Component Exchange – a subset of AppExchange that offers dozens of partner’s Lightning components
- Lightning Design System – Style guides and user experience best practices for both the Lightning experience and Salesforce1 Mobile app.
In some ways, Salesforce expects Lightning to be an update for Visualforce, the current user interface framework for the Salesforce platform. However, Lightning goes well beyond Visualforce in scope and capabilities.
Visualforce’s components are page-centric, and thus the server does most of the work for building and updating the user interface. Lightning components, in contrast, are client-side centric, making them more dynamic and responsive, without the same dependencies on the server that Visualforce has.
Now that Lightning is in the market, Salesforce’s impressive marketing engine is driving Lightning full speed ahead – with only one caveat: it’s not fully ready yet. In reality, Salesforce is rolling out Lightning over the course of a few years, with only limited capabilities generally available today, while other features are in beta, alpha, or still in the works internally at Salesforce.
Organizations who wish to move forward with Lightning today can leverage the elements that are available now and rely upon Visualforce for the rest, as Lightning is backward compatible. Everyone considering this course of action, however, should understand the pros and cons of mixing the newer and older technologies.
Have a Mess? Don’t Make it Worse
Because Visualforce has been in the market for a number of years, many Salesforce customers have been using it to create their own web pages on the Salesforce platform. As a result, such organizations are likely to face a challenge when they decide to move to Lightning, as they will have to decide either to keep existing Visualforce pages or rework them with Lightning.
Neither alternative is very appealing. Keeping existing pages as-is will lead to an inconsistent user interface, and Visualforce pages won’t be able to take advantage of any Lightning-only capabilities. On the other hand, migrating a large number of Visualforce pages to Lightning will take time and effort.
Starting now, however, such organizations can make an important choice that will keep this dilemma from getting worse: shift from custom-coding pages in Visualforce to a Salesforce-native Content Management System (CMS) like OrchestraCMS from Stantive.
OrchestraCMS supports Visualforce. As a result, any Salesforce customer using OrchestraCMS can create and manage pages and content using templates with drag and drop, rather than custom-coding Visualforce pages.
In addition, Stantive continues to move quickly to incorporate Lightning support as soon as Salesforce releases new Lightning capabilities to its partners.
As Lightning matures over time, therefore, OrchestraCMS customers can transition their Visualforce-based sites to Lightning easily, as OrchestraCMS will seamlessly switch Visualforce-based templates to Lightning templates as soon as each customer is ready for the migration.
Want to Avoid the Mess in the First Place? Use OrchestraCMS
One of the primary advantages of a CMS, of course, is that you can avoid building a hodgepodge of custom-coded pages. A CMS like OrchestraCMS separates content from presentation, so that as presentation needs vary, there is no need to rework the content.
Presentation needs can vary for several reasons. You may want to internationalize your site, and thus the same content will feed different localized versions. You may want to build a responsive site that looks and works just as well on a mobile device as it does on a tablet, laptop, or large screen. Most CMS tools support these common scenarios.
If your site runs on Salesforce, however, you also have the challenge migrating to Lightning. In this situation, OrchestraCMS is uniquely qualified to support the evolution of an organization’s presentation needs.
Because OrchestraCMS runs natively on Salesforce, it doesn’t simply support the platform’s look and feel. It also supports its underlying component architecture, security framework, and integration practices.
Remember, Lightning is more than an update to Visualforce. It’s a change in user interface paradigm from pages running on the server to responsive, client-centric components. The best way to insulate yourself from this transition is to leverage OrchestraCMS for existing as well as future content on Salesforce.
For more information on OrchestraCMS, please go to www.stantive.com/OrchestraCMS.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Stantive is an Intellyx client. At the time of writing, none of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. Image credit: BLM Nevada.
