4. Service Console Introduction
Look at the service console. And what I have on my screen right now is the Service application, that is the non console version. I pulled that up from the App Launcher by clicking the App Launcher and selecting Service. And you have several different tabs here available from the non console service applications such as Home Chatter, Accounts, Contacts, Cases, Reports and Dashboards. So if we click on the App Launcher and pull up the Service console for the Lightning Experience service Console, make sure you grab that one. Let me click on that again. It says Lightning Experience here in the description.
And frankly, I’m not a big fan of how consoles appear in Lightning Experience. There’s just too much space being taken up. And what you have to do in order to see everything the way this is laid out is you’ve got to collapse this list view here. So a couple of things to note as well. And here you see that’s a three column layout. In addition to the list view, you get the related list here on the side, the main body here, and on the left are case details and contact details.
That did here is that you can have several different objects in one view here on the console. And then as well, to bring that list view back up, you just click here in order to pop that back open and you can open up additional cases. I have Case 1016 open here and a lot of this is a rehash if you’re familiar with the console from the Admin exam. But I want to lay some groundwork around the console, specifically the Service console. And we’ll be spending time inside of the console as we start to layer further functionality into our service console here.
So you notice now that we’ve got tabs open for Case 1002 and Case 1016. So you can toggle back and forth, for example, and you can also access other records from inside the console. I’m going to click on my own user record here from Case Owner, for example. And so this is a sub tab under the Case 1016 as my own user homepage here. Now, with these list views, it works the same as with any list view. You can pin those, you can select other ones, you can change the filters, you can refresh and then select to open up additional cases here.
And then as well, down here at the bottom, we have a History tab here at the bottom. And then if you remember from the non console version, we saw the different tabs that were available in the service application. To get to the different tabs or objects that are available from this application, you can click the down arrow here to select from the objects available from the Service application inside the console here. So these are pretty much, I believe, the same exact objects and tabs such as Home Chatter. And there was cases, contacts, accounts, reports and dashboards. If you click Edit from here, you can start to ustomize what is available in the Service Console navigation items and you can rearrange by clicking and dragging. For example, you can add more items, which brings up all available items. So you just simply select what you would like to add to the Service Console.
So I’ve selected orders and then as well. Another thing I would like to add is our custom object that we created previously in course one of this Course series for Advanced Admin, we created an Asset Management application. So I could include Assets and let’s go ahead and include instead, let’s include Asset Management. So we’re adding orders and asset management. So let’s see what that looks like as we add those to our navigation. Clicking add to NAV items. And so these two NAV items now appear and we can drag those. I’m going to move Asset Management up higher and orders a little bit higher and click Save. So then the Toast message shows that the navigation bar has been updated. And so let’s click on this and let’s see this in action. So if we bring up Asset Management, this takes over the Service Console and shows us the Asset Management application and this is the default homepage for that Asset Management application.
Now, if you don’t have Asset Management in your own, it means that you’ve not worked through part one of this Course series. So be sure and check that out if you haven’t done so already. And so the main concept here though, for you to recognize inside of the Service Console, or any console application for that matter, is that you can add other applications to the console. And I did just that by adding that to the navigation items here. And I did that once again is by clicking Edit and then add more items and then selecting it from the list. It’s not in the list now because I’ve already added it. Now if I wanted to, I could remove that item.
So for example, Asset Management, I could click the X to remove it and I’ll go ahead and remove that now and click Save and watch. What happens with the console is even though the navigation bar has been updated, we still have our Asset Management tab selected previously. So we need to select a different option here. So let’s select orders. And now we’ve got orders on the left hand here for the list view. And so we still have a case open here that we opened previously, but we could open up an order and then that refreshes the screen here for an order in the console. And so now we’ve looked at a high level, adjusting some of the navigation items and some of the high level functionality of the console. And so the next lesson, I want to go more in depth on some of the components of a console application and we’ll make further changes to our service console. Starting the next lesson.
5. Customizing the Service Console with the Lightning App Builder
Let’s customize our service console and we’re going to make several different customizations through several different approaches. This is to make you more familiar with what can be done and what can be set up with the Service console as well as learning what some of the major components and functionality of the Service Console are. These are things that you need to know on the advanced admin exam, specifically here in the Service Cloud Applications knowledge area. It’s I’m on the cases tab inside the Service console and I’ve got a case page here. And I mentioned previously, I’m not a huge fan of this layout and yours may vary depending on what you’ve done or what customizations you’ve made in your own. But what you can do from here inside the console is you can actually edit this page layout here. Let me move the list view here because when we go to edit the page, we won’t have the list view on the side, but we will have the ability to edit this three column layout here by clicking the gear icon and then Edit page.
And then you’ll see here in the Lightning app builder for this Lightning page, it shows the three column view here and here’s the template showing the three regions. We can change this layout in order to conserve real estate on the screen by clicking Change. Instead of having three regions, which is what was selected, we could have instead, for example, either header and left sidebar. Now remember, inside of a console, then we’ve got on the left, typically on the left we have the list view. And so you may want to have for example, just one region or header and right sidebar, for example. Let’s go with that and just click Next. And then we’ve got to reposition our regions. We’ve got the current three regions, we have main region and right sidebar and left sidebar. And so what we can do is anything that’s in the main region already, we just keep that mapped over to the main region and then anything that’s in either sidebar, the current regions, we’re going to move over to just that singular sidebar on the right. So we’ll click done.
And so now it refreshes and we can rearrange in the Lightning app builder here. And so we could, for example, I’m not really digging this chatter feed over here. So we could drag this and move this over here to the right. Let me try that again. And it dynamically adjusts the width of that to fit the column width. And then for the related list, I prefer having that over here in the main and then as well case details that should probably go above. And so once you’ve made your adjustments to the page, you can click Save. And then what you need to do next is activate this page and you can associate this with the application which would be the Service Console application.
So I activating and so there’s three different activation options here. We’re going to make this the app default and assign as app default the service console for Lightning experience. And so now if we click Next and then save and here’s where I always wonder, do I need to save again? I’m going to go ahead and just click back, though. And we will now refresh the screen for service console and we see that our layout is just a two column layout with the main and then the right sidebar.
Now we’ve got the list view here that we can open back up. And so this makes things a little more palatable. I’m still not a huge fan, honestly, of the console enlightening. I feel like the console is a lot more robust and mature and classic. Of course, I do anticipate salesforce, making a lot of improvements in this area over the coming months and releases, and I hope that at least. So that is one way to customize the service console and that’s through the Lightning app builder. So next I want to show you other customizations you can do through the setup menu. So I’ll see you in the next lesson.
