There’s No Place Like (Your) Home (Page)

Did you know you can make a personalized home page for specific Salesforce users?

There is no place like a good home page. Customizing the homepage helps staff members find tools and information quickly and easily, and helps them understand that their Salesforce instance has been built specifically for your organization’s unique needs.

One thing that makes Salesforce really powerful is that you can present the same information in a number of different ways, for different users… but the vast number of different ways can be really confusing. Today we are focused on Lightning Pages, which allow you to:

• control the layout and content of a screen (with tabs, accordions, and conditional display of fields), and/or
• add additional functionality with report or screen flow components.

Each application and/or profile in your Salesforce account can have its own version of a Lightning Page assigned to it, which means (for example) that the same Contact record page could look vastly different in the Salesforce Fundraising app than in the LOCATE app.

Today’s tip is helpful for a situation where the same basic page design works for all users, but small tweaks for a few particular users will make a big difference. (As a general rule, you should minimize the number of apps and profiles you create, to make it easier to maintain your account.)

For example, imagine that your organization has two distinct teams, one that manages Volunteers and one that handles Fundraising. When folks on these teams log in to Salesforce each morning and visit the home page, they have different needs: the Volunteer team wants to see which volunteers they need to email to follow up from their last volunteer experience, and the Development team wants to see donations that need acknowledgement letters. We can add both of these things at the very top of their screen by adding two List View components to the Home page, and making them conditionally appear for users depending if they are responsible for raising money or carrying out your organization’s programs.

HOME PAGE WITH VOLUNTEER HOURS LIST

HOME PAGE WITH OPPORTUNITIES LIST

The Volunteer Team only sees the specific Task list view and the Development Team only sees the Opportunities list view.

Here’s how this works!

If you’re familiar with editing a Lightning Record page, then you probably know you can make a Lightning Component “conditional” based on the values of fields on that record (that is, you can make part of the page display data differently depending on the contents of the data itself!).

What you may not know is that you can also make Lightning Components conditional based on the device a user is using, a permission that they have been assigned, or a field on their User record. This is important, since there are no record fields for a home page!

1. Select Component
2. Click on “Select” under “Field:”
3. Choose “User”.
4. Select the field you want to use (our examples would use “Title” or “First Name”) and click “Done”
5. Enter in the operator and the value you want to use and click “Done”
6. Save your page, and if necessary activate it.

To take this a step further, consider adding a custom field to your User object, like “Department,” that can help you more easily maintain this customization over time as staff members come and go.

Ta-da! Customizing Lightning Pages like this can help you shape your Salesforce instance to better suit your organization’s needs.

You can check out this article to dive further into the amazing power of dynamic Lightning Pages.

You can also learn to maximize your Lightning Pages for records and how you can use specific components to organize your pages better.