Salesforce Lightning Migration Technical Obstacles

New Features and Updates

Lightning’s is feature-rich, and since its launch in 2015, the number of features keeps growing. But the number of options available can be a hindrance with a migration away from Classic. Admins who aren’t familiar with the new platform can be overwhelmed by business requests to add these features and customize them. 

Worse, if numerous new features are enabled on your new Lightning environment without proper review, the entire solution's performance can be impacted. This can cause the user experience to suffer, and the number of tickets and requests for fixes can skyrocket.

Performance Concerns and Remediation

We’ve mentioned two challenges to this point, and both of them have pointed to potential performance issues being associated with technical Lightning migration obstacles. 

It’s worth noting that, even without an overload of new features or poorly ported customizations, your organization could deal with high load times, navigation problems, scalability issues, and less responsive user interfaces. To fix these challenges, IT teams need the time to assess the overall health of their Salesforce implementation, port custom code, and improve data quality - time that some IT departments just don’t have.

Updating Existing Integrations and Addressing Technical Debt

Connecting Salesforce to a host of other applications, like ERPs, marketing tools, communications platforms, accounting systems, and so forth, extends the solution's usefulness and streamlines workflows across silos. 

A move to Lightning, however, may require these integrations to be revisited and refactored. Plus, if these integrations were built in a hurry or without fundamental requirements, they may be part of your IT team’s technical debt. Improving these integrations hasn’t bubbled to the top of your Must-Do list, but a migration would force them to be re-prioritized. Staying on Classic allows for the technical debt to remain unresolved.

Internet Explorer

The fact that Lightning doesn’t work with Internet Explorer is a significant problem for some companies. Some enterprises only allow users to have IE installed on their machines either because it’s the only browser that works with legacy apps, internal and external, or because of support concerns. 

Internet Explorer’s lack of adoption of some modern web standards meant it was left behind when Salesforce delivered Lightning Experience. That leaves some companies out in the cold since they don’t have the time or overhead to update those legacy systems, the budget to replace them, or the time and resource to commit to moving to a new company-wide browser standard. However, since Microsoft has put an end-of-life date on the browser for summer 2021, this could be a self-solving problem on the list of Salesforce migration challenges.

It’s not too difficult for some companies to come up with a list of tech challenges that can keep you from adopting the new Salesforce platform. Unfortunately for those companies, Salesforce has made it clear that Lightning is the future of the platform. While they don’t require a shift off of Classic today, it’s undeniably on the horizon. 

Six Consulting can help if technical obstacles hold you back from migrating off of Salesforce Classic and on to Lightning. Our deep experience with Salesforce and its customizations puts Six Consulting in the position to understand where you’re at and, most importantly, help you navigate a path that puts the full power of Salesforce Lightning in your hands.