Salesforce Platform - Lightning App Builder

I'm Eric Jacobson. I joined Salesforce a little over a year ago. I'm really excited to be here. I'm looking forward to this opportunity to share with you the brand new Lightning App Builder and the exciting news you may have seen. The Lightning App Builder previewed last fall at Dreamforce. Parker's on stage in a pretty exciting Lightning man costume there, you may recall, and he was introducing the world to the pilot. The very first view of, of the Lightning App Builder. Well, I'm really excited to tell you today that the Lightning App Builder is here. It's real. All right. So it is now going to be available to virtually all customers in summer 15. And what I mean by that is that if you're using Group Edition or higher, so basically all of our Salesforce editions, you will have access to the Lightning App Builder.

Wow. Group Edition customers, Group Edition and up.

So Group Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Ultimate Performance Edition, everybody gets access to the Lightning App Builder and you can start building now. You're going to be able to build apps for your mobile devices. So what we mean by that is you're going to build for your iPhones, your Android phones, your iPads, your other tablets. You've got the ability to build apps that are going to run inside of Salesforce One on those devices. And the beauty here is that you don't need to be a developer to build apps with the Lightning App Builder. This is a tool for our admins. We're empowering everybody to become app developers. All you need to do is drag and drop, point and click and you can build an app. In fact, in just a couple minutes, I'm going to build an app here live with you guys today, and we'll do it in just a couple of minutes. It's that fast.

That's risky.

I know we're going to be living on the edge. We've got the power of Lightning here and we're going to build apps.

Great.

Give you a little bit of an idea of the types of apps you might build and see inside of Salesforce1. One type of thing that you can build is you can build dashboard style applications. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, wait, Salesforce already has great dashboards and I can even access those from Salesforce1. But maybe I want to build something that's even a little bit more custom and has different types of visualization. As you can see on some of the images here, for example, you see that we're looking at some custom map views or things of that nature that may not be directly supported by Salesforce Dashboards, but you can take advantage of using Lightning components to build those applications. Now, my personal favorite use case is what I like to refer to as a point application. And that's a tailored solution to a very specific business problem. Countless studies have shown that the way you can increase productivity of your users is by giving them very focused applications. If you get in, you have one task to perform. You get it done, you move on, you're bound to be more successful than if you go in and there's 20,000 options you have to choose from just to get something done. You'll forget what you wanted to do before you even had a chance to get it done. So point applications are a great use for the Lightning app Builder. You can very easily construct the apps that you, your teams need, not just that your entire organization needs. So let's take a little bit of a look at the composition of an application. So here's one of those sample applications, one of those dashboard style applications. And the way an app is constructed is that a Lightning app is built as a Lightning page. Makes pretty good sense. Yeah. And that Lightning page consists of one or more Lightning components. And those Lightning components. We'll talk quite a bit more about where we can get those components from. But the one other thing that we can also add to our application is what we talk about as global actions. In the past, you may have remembered these being talked about as publisher actions or global publisher actions. Well, you can add a set of global actions to the action bar that shows up at the bottom of the screen there when you're using Salesforce one, and it gives you a great way to add more interactivity to your apps. Think about when you're using some of those global actions. Those global actions may be creating records. For example, say, imagine if you tied that into, say, a process. For example, something might have built using the process builder, which we released just a couple releases ago there, and you can start to build some really powerful applications, all with clicks, not a line of code. Wow. Now, the beauty of what we're doing with the Lightning App builder is we're helping you build mobile apps. Now, building mobile apps that are going to run across different devices can be tricky. It's commonly referred to as responsive design. The idea of saying that you're going to build one app that can work across a continuum of devices, and this has generally been something that has required pretty advanced development techniques. But we've taken the difficulty of that and taken care of that for you. We solved this One by the use of some pre built templates. Yeah. So you've got a selection of four different templates that you can choose from right out of the box there, where you can decide how you want your app to be laid out. And the system will automatically take care of changing the layout as you switch between your phone and your tablet and even your rotated tablet. And it can actually reflow the content across those screens dynamically.

That's intelligent design.

I think. So it's pretty powerful. Pretty powerful stuff there. And so with summer 15, we're supporting phone and tablet, you can certainly imagine more form factors are in the works. The components are the real stars here. The components, I want you to think of them as building blocks. I didn't just go steal a picture of my daughter's toy cabinet for fun here. It's really the point that the components, you should think of them as the way you construct your applications by putting these pieces together. They're modules that really help you to assemble that application. And that's what enables our admins to be able to quickly and easily build these applications without writing code, is that they can take these components and very easily lay them out onto their application. So we talked about components being the star here. We've got a variety of different sources where you can get components from. To begin with, Salesforce is going to provide your standard components. These are ones that when you launch the App Builder, they're there, they're ready to go for you. You don't need to do anything. They're ready for your use. Now, if you happen to have some custom developers in your organization or have access to some developers, you might choose to have some custom components developed just for you that meet your very specific needs. But before you go and do that, you might not even need to, because we have the App Exchange and this is a way that we can actually leverage our partners, our independent software vendors, to provide components that we can bring into our orgs and work with just like any of the other components. Wow. Yeah. So the beauty of this system is this diverse ecosystem that allows for a marketplace of components to be combined seamlessly with the standard components and all work in a consistent environment. Now, to talk a little bit more about the components that we're providing for you built into the App builder here, we've got a set of five standard components and you might think, wait, there's only five? Well, isn't that kind of limiting? Well, the thing is that these are five very versatile components. So for example, we have a filter list component Here that allows you to expose any of your saved shared lists from virtually any standard object and all of your custom objects. So that one component does a lot of different things for you. Similarly, a recent items component that you can tune in to just which objects you want to see recent records from. You've got some report charts that will allow you to leverage any of your shared report charts that you've already created. So you've got the ability to tap into analytics and bring that into your application. A rich text component allows you to very easily display some static information to your users. And Then lastly, a VisualForce page component, which is a way to leverage any existing investment you may have made in VisualForce for mobile. You can bring those pages in as components in your application as well. Now, rather than talking to you more and more about slides of this, I'd much rather get in and let's build an application.

Yeah, show me how it works.

Should we build a Lightning app?

Let's build.

Build.

Okay, so we're over here on my laptop now and we're looking at the Lightning App Builder inside of summer 15. We're going to go ahead and create a new application. It's going to launch our Lightning App Builder here. You may notice stylistically it looks a little similar to the Process builder and it's the general look of our new builder tools that we're building on the platform. Here we give you a nice little infographic to give you a sense that the apps that you're building are going to show up inside of the stage left or the menu navigation of Salesforce one. We'll go ahead and hit the next button. And now you can see these are those templates that we were talking about here. So we've got a choice of different page templates and you can see little diagrams. They're showing you how that application is going to transform as we switch between our phone and our tablet. So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and pick the three column template here for my application. And we'll imagine that we're building an app to keep track of information about trips that employees in our organization may be taking. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to call this application Trip Force. So we'll go ahead and launch that application there. And so now we're into our Lightning App Builder here. And you can see in the center we have our design canvas. This is where we can start constructing our application. I'm going to see what it would look like if I were going to Build it for a tablet. So we'll start out by seeing it in its widest view there and we'll start dragging some components on. So let's see here. Let's say that to begin with we want to see a list of our trips. We'll drag a filter list component on. We'll tune it into our trip object there we can go ahead and pick which list of trips we want. We'll say that we want to see five recent trips. We'll give it a nice little bit of descriptive text above that as well. Key trips for FY16. Jumping ahead of myself there almost made it FY17. We're in the future. Okay, so we'll go ahead and do that now. A list component there is great, but I want to have a little bit more visual presentation of my data as well. So I'm going to go ahead and add a chart that I've got. We'll tune that into our trip types chart so we can see in a pie chart format there. We can see some more data about our chart. And the last thing is that trips are a very geographic type thing, don't you think?

Yeah.

And perhaps we want to be able to see this information, I don't know, say on a map. Crazy, right? But our standard components there don't have any map components. But let's just do a quick search. And you can see here I've got some custom components. In fact, I even have some custom managed components that are coming from the app exchange here. And I can see what, I can see what it might look like on a map. So I'm going to go ahead and bring one of our partner components in over here. We're going to go ahead and just really quickly here now. Customize this so that it. We'll look at our custom object here. So now we've tuned it in so it's looking at our trip object and that's a pretty good start to our application. Why don't we go ahead and save this application? I'll hit the save button there. That's about all that takes. And now I want to deploy this application to my users. And you're thinking to yourself, ok, now this is where it's going to get hard. This has all been two weeks.

This has got to be the gotcha.

This has got to be the gotcha. Now we're going to write some deployment scripts and get our sysadmin on the phone and tell them they need to go upload the application to people's devices. Nah, we're going to hit the activate button. We get to pick a nice icon here. So we're creating a Trips application. I'll pick the airplane for it. I get to decide where I want it to appear inside of my Salesforce One mobile navigation. I'm going to drag it up right near the top, right beneath that feed. I'll hit that last activate button and that's it. We've just shipped that app. It is now going to be available to users on their mobile devices.

I'm still waiting for the 20 hours of code writing and the 15 hours of meetings to get this deployed. When does that come in?

Well, you can do that after the fact. I've built the app and deployed it. So why don't you want to see?

Yeah.

Show it to you. Okay, let's switch over to our iPad here and we should be able to see our application. I'm going to go ahead and bring in the menu. Just refresh that real quickly here and there, right beneath our feed item, it says trip for. So we'll go ahead and bring that up real quickly here. Our iPad starts loading. It's asking if it can use my current location. I'll say, sure, it can use my current location. It knows I'm sitting in San Francisco. It's good to get that kind of reminder at times, especially if you've been. I was doing a bit of traveling in some of our world tours. You're in London, you're in New York. You wake up, you walk out of the hotel and you're like, wait, what city am I in? At least your iPad knows.

You know what you could have used Trip Force.

Exactly. Now, we happen to be looking at this application right now in our tablet here in our portrait orientation. Remember when we were designing it, we were designing it in landscape. Remember we said this is responsive, however, so all it takes to see it in the other orientation is for me to just go ahead and rotate my iPad. And it's now gone from being a two column application to being a three column application.

Wow.

I know. It just does what you'd expect it to do. Right now you may be thinking to yourself, okay, well this is just a single screen application, but it's not limited to just that single screen because we've got a lot of interactivity here. For example, I can go back and I can go and look at this map component here. Zoom in. Let's take a look at some trips we might happen to have in other parts of the US Here. Let's see in New York, there oh, look at that. Salesforce World Tours coming up in just a couple weeks in New York City. If I want to see some more detail on that, I can actually tap on that detail in the pin there, and it actually drives me right into the detail record for my trip. So while you're starting with a single screen, you actually have the full power of the SalesforceOne platform here, and you can leverage any of your standard list or detail views that you've already got built and running inside of Salesforce one. Now, remember I mentioned, however, that we can build interactive applications here and this application to begin with is not particularly interactive. So why don't we go back into the app builder and add a little bit more functionality to it. We'll show you just how fast we can iterate on our application.

Great.

Okay, so we're back on the laptop here now and we're looking at our application. Now, the way that we add interactivity to our application is by the use of those global actions. So I'm going to go ahead and go to the page properties and configure some actions for my application here. So we'll go ahead and hit. Hit that and we'll go say that we want to be able to say, perhaps add a new trip note. When I'm going on all these various trips, I like to keep track of them with some notes. I might meet somebody, so I might have a new account that I want to keep track of or maybe even a new lead. So always when I'm traveling, I want to make sure that I'm keeping track of that. And if there's an opportunity for new business, I want to make that happen. So we'll add those actions there, have them right at our fingertips. We'll hit. Ok. The one other thing that I'm going to do, however, is I also want to have a way to view those trip notes. Yes. So we're going to take advantage of that recent items component that I was talking about here. And what we're going to do is we're going to tune it in so that instead of seeing account data, it actually shows us our recent trip notes. So make those couple of changes. And now we want to go and deploy this new version of our application. You're thinking now must be the time that it gets hard.

I was going to say now. I mean, now that we've made changes, surely this is where now's when we're.

Going to hit save. We don't even have to activate again. All we have to do is save. So we'll switch back over to our iPad here and take a look at the app actually running. And all I want to do now. Okay, now maybe now is where it's going to be hard right now. I want to get the new version of the application here.

So we've got to reload the app and everything like that.

Right? Pull the refresh.

That's it.

That's it.

I could do that.

You can do that. So we can push new Trip Note. We can go in here and we can log our trip note. We can say, Hello, summer 15. Which trip do we want to see this? I think this is a VIP meet and greet. Everybody that's in our audience today is definitely a VIP in my book. So we'll go ahead and we're going to save this Trip Note here gives a little toast at the top there telling us that that note was successfully saved. Now, if I just do once again, another pull to refresh. What you'll notice is that recent items component there has updated and it's now saying, hello, summer 15. So your data is right there at your fingertips. Just like that.

That's incredible.

Okay, so I think that kind of gives you a sense for the types of things that you're going to be able to create in. In summer 15 with the Lightning app builder. Now, we're just getting started here, so why don't we switch back to the slides and I'll give you a little bit of a glimpse as to where we intend to take the app builder going forward.

Please do.

Okay, so as you can imagine, we've been talking about phones and tablets. The desktop is definitely something that we're hard at work on. So that's definitely something that you can expect to see in the future, is the ability to create apps that would span that spectrum for from your phone to your tablet, all the way up to your desktop. Additionally, we'll have custom page templates. So you saw those four that we looked at there. But we'll have the ability to bring in additional custom page templates. We'll have the component exchange. So we talked about app exchange for components. We'll actually be able to have an integrated shopping experience. So you say, hey, I need a component that does geographic geospatial rendering. Yeah, okay, fine. Push a button, type in geo, and it'll start to show you components that people have built and published to AppExchange that are available for you there. And you can bring those right into your org, just like that. You'll have the ability to do other types of Pages. So ultimately customizing the pages that you look at when you're looking at object views or lists of records or details, when you're seeing the specifics of an individual record in your system. We'll also add the ability to build multiple page applications where you'll be able to dictate the screen flow as you go from screen to screen and have a more complex application experience there. And then lastly, you can imagine that branding and visual customization is also important. It's very important when you're working with companies to be able to give them their brand identity within the application. There companies very often identify with a color. Salesforce. We've got our Salesforce Blue and you want that to be embodied in the application. Your organizations, your companies may have similar, similar types of brand identity and you want to take advantage of that as well.

Amazing.

That's what we've got for the Lightning App Builder.

Oh, that's all?

That's all.

That's all we've got. Eric, you've just shown us something that has so many potential use cases. My head's swimming right now. So I think it would benefit everybody if we took me out of the equation and found out what our customers really feel about this. Elna, what's going on in Twitter?

Well, Mike, it's really exciting that so many admins will be able to use this to create their own apps. And Carol says wow. That was all she had to say.

I agree, Carol. Wow indeed. Wow indeed.

Just to clarify, that's all customers with Group Edition and up. And is there any special setup or purchase required?

Nope, it's automatically included. There's nothing additional license there. It is part of the platform. So if you have Group Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Performance, Unlimited, you're good to go.

And even a dev Org, especially a dev Org, of course, especially Navai had asked that.

Yes, absolutely.

Sean's question was, can I really just go in and start building apps?

Well, you still, of course you need to have administrative rights in your organization, so it is easy enough for anybody to use. But you do need to have the permission to make those types of changes in your org.

Most of these apps can be built with clicks or does it take development knowledge?

Everything that we looked at today, my entire demo, was built 100% with clicks if you want to be able to create a custom component. And that's when you'd be actually building a lightning component. That does require some development at that point. But in terms of working within the app builder, it is 100% click based.

So if I need components, where can I get them? What are the various options I have to get components?

Well, like I said to begin with, you've got the standard components that are provided to you, but I think the best place to look after that is to go to AppExchange. So we have recently launched AppExchange for components. If you do a search for components on the AppExchange, you'll start to see more packages showing up every day. There's some great ones there like the map one that we just looked at. There's a wide variety of others and I think that as the app builder becomes more and more popularly used, you'll see more and more components showing up. It's one of those virtuous cycle types of things.

So as of now, is the app Exchange for components, does that use the same UI as the AppExchange? Is it as user friendly or is that something that we're working on?

It's the app exchange experience that you know and love today. Wow.