Launchpad Lesson 23 - The Home Page

For some users, the homepage really won't be much of a focus, while others will use it to get their day started.

You do have the ability to customize the homepage based on user profile. So, a sales user might see different components than a service user, for example.

However, in this lesson, we're going to show you how to customize the homepage for all users. If you decide it's a worthwhile exercise, you'll know how to do it.

The homepage is where you land every time you log in to Salesforce. By default, Salesforce includes several different components on the homepage.

You'll see a graph for quarterly performance, a news bar that delivers web-based news articles based on the accounts you've created in Salesforce, and below that, today's tasks and events, recent records, and key deals.

There's also an assistant on the right-hand side that suggests actions to help you keep your opportunities up to date.

In our opinion, the quarterly performance chart isn't all that applicable to many businesses. We'd suggest replacing it with one of your customized sales dashboards, with input from your sales team.

Let's get into Salesforce now and show you how.

Go into Setup and, in the Quick Find box, type “Lightning App.” Then select Lightning App Builder.

Click New. Once there, select Homepage and click Next.

You want to give it a label, such as Rocket Shop Homepage, and click Next again.

In this step, you choose the layout of the homepage you want to build. We highly recommend cloning the current homepage and editing it from there, rather than starting from scratch.

To do that, click the tab that says Clone Salesforce Default Page, and then click Finish.

Now, in the Lightning App Builder, you'll see the current homepage layout, where we can change the components as we wish, just like we did for all of our objects in the earlier lessons.

I already mentioned replacing the quarterly performance chart with your own dashboard. Personally, I don't really care about the components for today's tasks and events, recent records, and key deals either, because I tend to go to other places to get that information, like the Tasks tab and Kanban board, for instance.

But one component I really do like is the assistant. He—or maybe she's a she. I haven't quite figured it out yet—keeps me up to date on all my opportunities.

So, let's put in a dashboard.

From the left-hand column, we'll click on Dashboard and drag it up above the quarterly performance panel.

On the right-hand side of the screen, we can select which dashboard we want to display. Let's select the one we just installed and modified: the Sales Manager Dashboard.

You can leave Max Height blank. However, if you want to compress your dashboard into a smaller space, choose a number like 500 pixels.

You might want to create a special dashboard with fewer components than our example, specifically for your homepage. Again, getting input from your sales team is a really good idea.

Now that we have our dashboard, we don't really need the quarterly performance graph. So, let's hover over it and remove it by clicking the trash can.

For some of the components on the page, you can further customize them. If you want to edit the settings for any component, select it by clicking on it and then edit the settings in the right-hand column.

Here's an example: We can change the News component from a list to a carousel.

Once you're happy with the components, click Save in the upper right.

You'll get a pop-up telling you that the page needs to be activated in order to be displayed. So, let's click Activate.

For this exercise, we're creating the homepage for all users, so we'll assign it as the org default.

If this were a homepage for a specific group of users, we could assign it by app or profile.

After selecting that, click Save.

Now we've created, saved, and activated this homepage. We can exit the Lightning App Builder, go look at our homepage in production, and see the changes.

If we want to make any further changes to this universal homepage, just go back to the Lightning App Builder by selecting the gear while on the homepage and then clicking Edit Page, just like we did before.

Just make sure to click Save if you make any edits so that the changes are updated.

All right, we're almost there. Can you believe it?

Next up: a lesson on getting your new users set up.