Salesforce Lightning on Your Mind? Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Migration Process

Sixty-nine percent of users say that it is easier to use their Salesforce instance today than it was 12 months ago.

But not everyone is convinced. A large number of Salesforce users have yet to migrate to Lightning Experience. They have not moved already because a common perception is that:

• The migration process takes a lot of time and effort
• Calculating the goods and bads of migration is a hard job
• Scrutinizing existing customizations is time-consuming
• The transition affects process management efficiency because companies need to train users on a new UI
• Some important Classic features are missing in Lightning

Although each concern is valid to an extent, the obstacles are not insurmountable.

This strategy guide documents how we overcame those challenges and successfully migrated an online community from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience for a customer.

Beginning

The customer had their online community in Visualforce (VF). They wanted to migrate it to Lightning Experience to leverage the advanced functionalities and out-of-the-box components that maximize administrator involvement in community management.

Challenges

The three main challenges to a successful migration were:

• Complexity in data preservation:The existing community and almost all its data (with links) needed to be moved, and the process was not a straightforward one.
• Lack of features in Lightning:The unavailability of some of the Visualforce features in Lightning did not make life easier. Custom components had to be developed.
• Differences between Visualforce and Lightning:Extra caution was required in managing extensions and integrations because of the many differences between Visualforce and Lightning.

Journey to Success

The process started with identifying and documenting the differences in Visualforce and Lightning components. A summary of what happened next follows.

Step 1: We thoroughly analyzed the community; amount of data, complex data, best answers, threads, and everything that had to be migrated.

Step 2: After the analysis, our developers introduced several changes, including

• Adding custom functionalities,
• Customizing existing functionalities, and
• Creating custom back-end and front-end components.

Step 3: Once everything was in place, the entire migration job was put to a stringent quality analysis.

What’s Next?

Despite its ease of use, Salesforce Lightning is still far from being universal. It still lacks some features available in Classic and migration is anything but simple. However, with a bit of ingenuity, the challenges can be overcome.

We have detailed the entire process in Migrating Salesforce Community From Visualforce to Lightning Experience.

It is a strategy guide in which you will find the:

• Complexities involved in migration
• Primary differences between Lightning and Visualforce components
• Detailed procedure explaining each step of a successful migration process
• Most suitable time to migrate
• Features and components you will and will not get in Lightning
• Right way to proceed with migration

Download your free copy now!