Our journey migrating from legacy picklists to the new Picklist Center was delayed multiple times, but eventually migrated successfully. We were waiting on the migration to add and modify some existing picklists based on some of the improved functionality (custom display order) and its a welcome enhancement.
The migration tool was easy to use, the only conflicts we had to manage were translations- resolved by copy/pasting the legacy picklist translation values into the new MDF picklists, less than an hour of work.
Overall, the new Picklist center is feature rich and a vast improvement – creating and maintaining picklists through a UI, rather than reloading an entire .csv file for a small update to a singular picklist.
As with all MDF objects – picklists are now effective dated, selections presented display order can be updated alphabetically ascending or descending, granting much more flexibility for the EC admin and most importantly, the end user.
As an example, I edited an existing picklist “employmentType” with an effective date of 3/1/2019 in order to add a new employment type “Officer” to the list, and to customize the display order.
2 versions of the picklist should now be visible, the original and new.
Adding the employeeType “Officer” into the new picklist and resorting the picklist to display “Permanent” as the first picklist value and “Officer” as the 2nd picklist value is done by updating the “Sort Order”.
For the end user, the ability to update the display order of a Employee Central picklist is improves data entry ease and accuracy. If in the course of business, a picklist contains 5 values, one of which is selected 80% of the time- the picklist can be edited to have the most frequent value displayed first, and become the default value on save, yet giving the user freedom to also make other selections.
Permanent was updated to “0” and Officer to “1”
Together with the rest of the picklist, it now looks as follows – Sort Order is the last column on the right.
Thats it – the updated picklist is now complete and active!