Salesforce just made its Spring 19 release live and there is a couple of really interesting stuff in this release.
Let us focus on the Spring 19’s Lightning Scheduler today.
Lightning Scheduler is a native scheduling solution within Salesforce that leverage the employee skills and availability as parameters and subsequently enabling your customers to schedule meetings with whoever is available at their time of choosing.
If you are already using the Field Service Lightning product from Salesforce you would have the first-hand experience with the Lightning Scheduler.
Do note that this comes with an additional cost on top of the base edition that you are on and it supports only the Enterprise or Unlimited editions.
Objects
With Lightning Scheduler, you will have access to a couple of additional objects.
- AppointmentSchedulingPolicy
- ServiceTerritoryWorkType
- WorkTypeGroup
Getting Started
Configuring Lightning Scheduler does take a similar approach to set up Field Service Lightning.
You will have to consider the following Territories, Operating Hours, Resources, Skills, Work Type Groups, and Work Type.
From a configuration standpoint, you will have to work from the top down and each individual records have dependancy on each other.
- Service Territories
- Operating Hours
- Service Resources
- Skills
- Work Type and Groups
Summary
In summary, after working through the setup and verification, we are torn between if its a yea or nay.
Yea
If you have a huge workforce that constantly struggles with scheduling issues and this has a direct impact on your business as usual, you should definitely spend the time and effort on acquiring this and following this setup guide.
Considering that Salesforce does have a good track record of enhancing their products with new releases, we are sure that you are in good hands here.
Nay
Give this a pass, for now, if you are just looking at a simple scheduling tool to help your sales reps with their day-to-day.
This simply doesn’t justify the effort and cost. We would actually recommend you either leverage custom build solution (a couple of simple custom objects), Appexchange or just leverage Salesforce Inbox.
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