Salesforce Lightning Automatically Enabled – Don’t Panic

By now, most of you have either seen the announcement in an email, social media, or in the release notes.

In the Winter ’20 release coming out October

12, Salesforce will start automatically enabling lightning for all customers.

“But Brian!” I hear you say. “I’m not ready for Lightning! My users haven’t been trained! I haven’t run the optimizer!

We can’t use Lightning because of feature X which doesn’t work in Lightning yet!”

I hear you dear reader. First things first, just like Douglas Adams “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” – DON’T PANIC! Second, make sure you know where your towel is.

Yes. Salesforce is automatically enabling Lightning for all customers starting in October. But let’s look at what this really means.

Enabling Lightning Experience

What Salesforce is doing is simply Enabling Lightning.

It’s the same as manually clicking on the little switch and making it turn blue,.

That’s it. That’s all. For customers on Enterprise Edition and up this is 100% manageable so you can deploy Lightning on your time frame.

You still want to move to Lightning, but with the pressure off you can plan for your transition.

This is because Salesforce is not:

• Updating Custom Profiles
• Changing any other permissions
• Editing Users, records, page layouts

It’s just flipping the bit. Users must have the “Lightning Experience User” from their profile or a permission set. Without it, they cannot access Lightning regardless if it’s enabled or not. So if you’re Enterprise & higher customer, you just need to do the following:

1. Review all Custom Profiles and remove the “Lightning Experience User” permission
2. Review Permission Sets and remove the “Lightning Experience User” permission
3. Ensure all users are in a custom profile

Chances are unless you recently upgraded from Professional Edition, you already have the majority of your users in a custom profile. That leave one potential loop hole and that’s the System Administrator profile. It’s very common for customers to use this profile. It makes sense if you’re the system Admin, but this profile has a tendency to get assigned to managers, executives, C-suite etc. This is typically done because it’s simply easy to give those users access to everything.

That’s the problem. It gives the user access to everything. In most cases, you only need 1 person in the system administrator profile. Everyone else should be in a custom profile and that includes other people who are managing Salesforce. Put the Salesforce Admin Lead in the standard profile and create a custom system admin profile for your other users. Then move all those other people who simply need access to all the data into a different custom profile. If you have to, you can use the “modify all” permission for this profile. I would strongly recommend taking the time to restrict it to just the objects/data the person needs. That’s your call.

Now everyone is in a custom profile except maybe your main system admin. You’re all set. Start planning that transition and when you’re ready, simply give the users the Lightning Experience User permission to get them into Lightning.

“Wait Brian!” I hear. “What about me?”

The challenge with Professional Edition (PE) is everyone is in a Standard Profile.

A little over 2 years ago, Salesforce announced the “Lightning” update for their editions. Part of this update gave Professional Editions 2 custom profiles. The intention was to support a partial Lightning Transition for users.

Most of the PE customers I’ve seen use 2 profiles: Standard User, and System Administrator.

In this circumstance, you’re golden. Use your 2 custom profiles. Clone the Standard User profile and remove the Lightning Experience User permission. Move all the users on the Standard User profile to your brand new custom one. You can do the same thing for any other system admins – although I recommend keeping 1 user in the standard profile.

“That’s great, but I’m using more than 2 profiles!” You exclaim. This does happen. Some customers will also use the “Marketing User,” “Contract User,” or “Read Only” profiles. That’s more than your 2 custom profiles. However, PE customers also get access to Permission Sets.

Permissions Sets are basically like profiles except a user can have multiple Permission Sets assigned to them. Permission Sets are additive, they don’t take away permissions. There is a pilot to “mute permissions” but it’s not generally available and I would recommend using Pilot features in your production environment.

There is a permission to “Stay in Classic.” You can create a permission set and then assign it to users that are stuck in a standard profile. They may get flipped to Lightning, but they can switch back to Classic and then they will stay there. This permission prevents Salesforce from auto-switching a user back to Lightning weekly or daily depending on your settings.

Alternatively, you can also move these folks into your cloned “Standard User” profile and create Permission sets to add the additional permissions from Marketing User or Contract User. If you have lots of users in the “Read Only” profile that must stay in classic, you can either give them the “Stay in Classic” permission via a Permission Set and then have them switch to classic once. You can also choose to use 1 of your custom profiles for Read Only instead of using it for System Administrators.