Tips for Passing the Lightning Experience Rollout Specialist Superbadge

Yesterday, Salesforce released a brand new Trailhead superbadge as part of its drive to increase the adoption of Lightning Experience, the latest user interface. We had a competition going at work to complete this badge by a certain date; this only made me all the more determined to complete it as soon as possible after its release. It was quite a challenge; it really does take the 9-12 hours it says it takes (though I’m sure developers would disagree).

This post is to share what I learned so that you can pass the superbadge too.

In a nutshell

You’ll be covering:

• Readiness Check
• Optimizer
• Lightning pages
• Building a Lightning app
• Compact layouts
• Sales Path
• Profiles and Permission Sets
• Migration from Documents to Files
• Basic Lightning Components
• Updating Visualforce pages for Lightning
• Creating lightning pages for Chatter groups
• Reports – and report scheduling
• Create a Dashboard
• Enabling Lightning Knowledge
• Configuring Lightning Knowledge
• Updating custom links in readiness for Lightning

Tips

• There’s a LOT of preparatory work to complete before you start the challenges
• Do this trailhead before you start: Improve Your Classic App by Moving it to Lightning Experience
• DO NOT click “Check Challenge” without going through the Readiness Check report. There are tasks within this report that you will have to complete first. And they know, man.
• Read the requirements and digest them carefully.
• Google and the developer forums have some great articles to help you
• Naming conventions. For your own sanity, stick with the naming conventions where they have been supplied
• When the requirements talk about pages, more often than not they don’t tell you that this means Lightning pages
• It talks about an Apex class for the final task, but I didn’t really need to use it
• Quiz: There are two quizzes in this badge; there are a few business-specific questions that remind me of exam questions

Gotchas

Readiness Report

I got complacent and hit the Check Challenge button pretty much straight away before the report arrived in my inbox. DON’T DO WHAT I DID!! Go through the report and complete the tasks before attempting to check it. You’ll be updating custom links, hiding related lists, updating profiles to hide Documents, amongst other things.

Visualforce Restyling

If you’re not a developer, like me, this one could annoy you. I had 2 developers help me out on the forums with this and the great thing is, as much as I wanted them to, they didn’t just give me the code. I figured it out using some articles and trailheads they linked. So thank you, again to Carl Brundage and also Aaron Pratt. The main thing is to use <apex: slds/> to restyle the page, but don’t forget the block table needs changing as well.

Key Sales Data Lightning Page

A few people have been struggling with this one – make sure you have all your components in place for this page, then switch the view from Desktop to Phone and enable the Log a Call and New Opportunity actions.

Highlight Key Details on Accounts

To pass this, you’ll need to create a new record type – the name doesn’t matter. This enables you to display the key highlights just for Paloma. In practice, you wouldn’t implement this – you’d look at a component filter, or you’d have a conversation about which other groups might benefit from seeing this component.

Communications App

A colleague of mine had a problem with this part of the task – it wasn’t recognising Paloma having the permissions to access the app and it got a bit funny with the name. His advice was to create the app from within Lightning App Builder itself (this is where he went wrong) and name it “Communication” the first time. Thanks for sharing your experience, Naz!

Chatter Group

You need to create the group but also a Lightning record page for that group. It gets funny if you change the default name of the Lightning page you create, so name it “Group Record Page” and please make sure you put a description in (a few users on the developer forums have had that one cause some weird errors). Thanks very much to Carl Brundage who helped me out with this one.

Lightning Knowledge

It’s easy to forget that in order for Knowledge to appear in your setup area, you must be ticked as a Knowledge User on your user record.

Once you’ve enabled Knowledge, go back to the settings and tell it to enable Lightning Knowledge. Easily missed.

Reports

We are asked to build one report to show the pipeline, then build a dashboard with 3 components. You only need to use one report for the three charts (adding groupings along the way), but you can still pass if you build a second report to deal with one of the others. I won’t say which one, but read the requirements for setting up reporting for sales managers very carefully.

Destination Success URL

Fiddly stuff….and all the while, you know you can solve this easily by just adding a Rich Text box with a hyperlink in it to your Lightning page. But the test is on Lightning Components. I looked at a few articles, asked my boss (who got me one step closer – thanks Andrew!), nearly tore my hair out because none of it made any sense to me, but eventually, my husband saved the day with a bit of HTML knowledge.

So…conscious that I’m saying stuff I don’t even understand that well (devs, you’ll be laughing at me but hopefully some non-technical people will find this useful):

• Your URL goes into the attribute line
• Your component needs to implement flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes
• You’ll need to use <ui: outputURL
• outputURL is where you also need a blank target to get it to open up in a new page

Now that it’s done…

I’m really loath to post code snippets and screenshots in here, because it is possible, with some patience and a few hours to spare, to pass this with no developer knowledge at all and come away having learned something useful. It may even encourage you to go and do some coding badges.

The most useful articles I found are linked throughout. I hope you find this useful :0)