By now you've realized that Salesforce is increasingly pushing its user base to leave Salesforce Classic behind, and make Salesforce Lightning the primary way you use Salesforce.   During the last year, a number of HandsOn Connect users switched over to lightning, and we offered a manual installation of a native Lightning version of HandsOn Connect.  This manually installed ("unmanaged") version of our app is called "HOC Lightning" and a number of you are already using it.

After many months of testing and refinement, we have in this release, added a native lightning version of HandsOn Connect to our main package. This makes a lightning native version of HandsOn Connect available for all HandsOn Connect customers whenever they are ready to start using the Lightning environment.  This "Managed" version of the application is called "HandsOn Connect Lightning".

For those customers who didn't ask for a manual install of a native lightning version of HOC in the past year, the HandsOn Connect Lightning application is now installed and ready for you to configure when you decide to activate lightning and start using it!  It will require a small bit of configuration on your part when you decide to start using it. Instructions on activating lightning in your organization and configuring the HandsOn Connect Lightning app can be found in this series of articles in the Advanced System Administrator Guide.

If you need help doing the configuration or in learning the ropes of using HandsOn Connect in Lightning drop into any of our daily lab sessions.

Note: if you prefer to continue working in Salesforce Classic you absolutely can do so.  There is a learning curve to working in lightning - and we suggest you take your time getting familiar with lightning before switching all your internal users over to it. We've just made it easier to use HandsOn Connect when you're ready to start getting familiar with Lightning.

Question: "You've already installed "HOC Lightning" for us, so do we now need to switch over and start using the "HandsOn Connect Lightning" app?

No.  The two applications are essentially the same. And both will be available in your lightning app selector.  You can continue to use HOC Lightning since its already configured and has some advantages to you going forward. Since the "HOC Lightning" app is 'unmanaged' - it is a bit simpler for you to customize when you wish to - and when we installed it manually for you, we did a lot of advanced configuration for you.  You can continue to use HOC Lightning, and can, for now, ignore the HandsOn Connect Lightning application which is also installed in your organization.  

What's the difference between HOC Lightning and HandsOn Connect Lightning?

"HOC Lightning" is an unmanaged package - which means that everything that was installed can be customized by the system administrator.  We were able to include more features in the Utility Bar, Give you more flexibility in the navigation elements, and overall it is easier to make changes to the application.

"HandsOn Connect Lightning", because its part of the 'managed' application, has some restrictions on what you can and can't edit or change in the application's configuration.  Luckily, Lightning allows you to clone most parts of the application (Lightning Pages, Page Layouts, Home Page, etc.) so system admins can expand and customize the majority of HandsOn Connect Lightning.  It just requires a bit more work than working with the unmanaged version of the application.

We'll continue to publish tips and tricks on how to customize the HandsOn Connect Lightning application.

For those of you who did not previously have "HOC Lightning" installed -- you can start using "HandsOn Connect Lightning" now, as soon as you enable lightning and configure the application.

In the sharing portal, when the end date of the single occurrence of an Individually Scheduled Opportunity was updated - the posting status of its volunteer opportunities did not reflect that the opportunity was now published.  This has been corrected.

Cleaned up issues where rows of a check-in sheet were split across two pages and addressed random page breaks that sometimes appeared.