What is Lightning Flow?
Lightning Flow is a new Lightning Platform service that empowers any business to create and extend the power of process automation to any customer or employee experience. With Lightning Flow, you can create guided, visual processes with Lightning components and easily add them to a record, app, portal, and console.
Wait, I think I know Visual Flows
Yes, you may also have heard the term Visual Workflow but that’s a retired product name for designing, managing, and running flows. Visual Workflow has been superseded by Lightning Flow.
Okay. Is Flow and Lightning Flow the same?
Well, here are the 3 definitions to clarify everything about Flows.
- Lightning Flow: the product that encompasses building, managing, and running flows and processes.
- Cloud Flow Designer: a point-and-click tool for building flows.
- Flow: an application that automates a business process by collecting data and doing something in your Salesforce org or an external system.
In short, the Lightning Flow product includes a tool called the Cloud Flow Designer which helps you to create Flows.
Lovely. How is Lightning Flow different?
Using the power of low-code, drag-and-drop functionality to customer engagement, Lightning Flow delivers an innovative new way for businesses to realize the benefits of process automation: including reduced wait times for customers, digitized business workflows, and improved team productivity.
Lightning Flow brings together several innovations native to the Lightning Platform, including:
- Lightning Flow Components: Leverage reusable Lightning components to design rich flow screens and guided, visual processes.
- Integrated Processes: Orchestrate workflows and 3rd party services with Platform Events, External Services, and Local Actions.
- Process-Driven Apps: Embed Lightning Flow processes into every customer and employee app experience using Lightning App Builder and Community Builder.
Got it. How to enable Lightning Flow?
Go to Setup → Process Automation Settings → Enable Lightning runtime for flows
That was simple. How does a Flow look like now?
Well, it has the new Lightning skin! Here’s a simple feedback capturing flow.
Quick Account creation flow on your homepage. Isn’t it cool?
It is, indeed! What’s next?
Exciting news. Lightning Flow has got some major upgrades with a brand new, faster, easier, efficient tool for building flows – Lightning Flow Builder to replace the Cloud Flow Designer. Watch out for our insights on it in our future blog posts.
We would be glad to hear feedback from you and answer any questions.
Additional Reading: Cloud Flow Designer