Salesforce Lightning Roadmap

Salesforce recently announced availability of Lightning Roadmap in public domain. This will be quite useful for customer and partners alike to perform a lightning fit-gap assessment and plan a robust migration/release strategy.

What is Salesforce Lightning Experience ?

A set of refreshed modern user interfaces optimised for speed and mobility. Lightning Experience is a completely new Salesforce and a completely new way to sell & serve. It’s a re-imagined platform designed to maximise productivity, complete with analytics and in-line intelligence that will drive sales precision.

Why Salesforce is drip-feeding Lightning Features with every release as opposed to just switching it on across all features/clouds for all customers ?

As one can probably imagine, Salesforce Lightning is not just about new fonts and colours and icons. It is much more than just a refreshed user interface. There are quite a few reasons for this drip-feed approach, some of the key ones are,

• It is quite a big change for customers. This has lead to optional switch-over. This will allow customers to plan their release, change and migration strategy which is quite important in enterprise environment.
• Allow customer to utilise existing customisations by ensuring backward compatibility with Classic Experience. This gives customer the ability and flexibility to plan their migration strategy around customisation (e.g. Visualforce Page to Lightning Component.
• Allow Salesforce Engineering team adequate time to migrate numerous features (across all clouds) to Lightning Component Framework and surrounding toolkit.
• Allow Salesforce AppExchange partners to migrate their technology components from classic to Lightning Component Framework

For all of the reasons above and many more(quite hard to list all of them in-fact), drip-feeding does make perfect sense.

By providing Lightning Roadmap in public domain, Salesforce in trying to facilitate this migration journey for existing customer and also allow new customer to gauge suitability of Lightning Experience.

P.S.: Salesforce Safe Harbour statement applies for all the roadmap items. Because these roadmap items can change at any time, it is always advised to make any purchasing decision based on the technology that is currently generally available(GA).

Author: Monil Pathak, Salesforce Certified Domain Architect with around 5 years of experience in delivering enterprise level Salesforce.com projects.