Automated Our Donation Acknowledgement Process
by Alan Corcoran

“I’m a volunteer with a non-profit organization and we have to send paper based receipts as well as “thank you’s” for all donations we receive. Even with an enhanced non-profit version of Salesforce, we could only partially automate this process. With the Drawloop DDP concept plus some excellent tips from the Drawloop team, I was able to completely automate the generation, population, attachment and queueing of the Donation Acknowledgement package, saving us time and eliminating the need for generating “task” reminders and additional manual steps. Drawloop gives us more time to focus on fundraising and the arts, reduces Inbox overload, allows us to schedule and delegate printing and helps make sure we don’t forget to send our donors a “Thank-you”, as well as their tax documents.”

Description:

Drawloop for Salesforce on the iPad® is the easiest way to dynamically generate all your documents in the cloud. We provide a native document creation service that is built for the Apple® iPad®. Quickly create the same customer and client-specific documents you have used for years to close more deals, increase revenue and improve productivity. From the iPad, you can create (DDPs) using data from Salesforce.

Requirements:

In order to use the free iPad app, you are required to have:

1) Latest version of LOOP Document Services installed into your Salesforce org

OR

2) Registered on LOOP Platform – get a 30-day free trial today!

Why would you need to use DDP Forms?

1) You can’t get a field added to Salesforce

If you are like many of our enterprise Salesforce customers, you know the pain of getting a new field approved and added. We lived through some of this pain with customers often waiting weeks, months and in one case, over a year!

2) You don’t want to create a new field

When you begin to evaluate your documents (contracts, quotes and agreements), you will discover that fields required to merge your documents are missing from Salesforce. DDP Forms solve this problem by allowing you to capture the data required for document generation without having to add a new Salesforce field.

3) You want a quick wizard to isolate fields for input or review

For example, your Opportunity object may contain lots of fields that are not required to generate an initial quote or generate a sales contract. With DDP Forms, you can present ONLY the required fields to generate the DDP. A DDP Form allows you to complete the form and then have the DDP automatically populate the data back to Salesforce while generating your customized quote or sales contract.

Some uses of DDP Forms include:

• Quote that relies on outside data:
  You may have outside services that are not integrated with Salesforce and critical data is required for input before generating a sales quote. DDP Forms allow you to have users click a button, be presented with a web form to capture any additional information and then run the DDP.




• Want to isolate inputs for sales proposal:
  DDP Forms allow you to give sales reps a simple and easy interface to collect only the data required to generate a sales proposal. This can be helpful when a Salesforce object has a lot of fields.

Please contact us today to learn more about DDP Forms.

Now, not only can you post Chatter messages at DDP run time, you can stream the DDP document with the message. This new feature extends the power of our document merge and automation service within Salesforce by allowing dynamic documents to be pushed to Chatter so you always know what’s going on.

The DDP admin can determine which DDP delivery option posts a message to Chatter.

Take a minute to watch DDPs with Chatter in action!

Let us know how you are using DDPs with Chatter!

When we change . . . they change with us!
by Douglas Fullaway
“The Drawloop offerings have made it easy to generate orders and update our records. We have a complicated set of computations that need to be done and every customer is slightly different. When we had to change our prices, processes and computations they made life simple for us. You will find a great “can do” attitude with everyone at Drawloop.”

Take a moment to explore what’s possible with Drawloop on Salesforce!

Confused on how to use this delivery option?  Here’s an example of where “email user” functionality can be used.  Let’s say your sales reps don’t want to wait for the DDP to be created or they need to include other elements or more thoughtful email communication with the proposal. With email user delivery, the sales rep can click a button and then receive an email with the attached merged DDP. From there, the user can work within email to deliver the DDP later in the day when he or she has time to review and complete the communication to go out with the sales proposal.

Your organization can also leverage Salesforce email services to archive and store the email of the DDP to the customer. Learn more about Salesforce email services.

If you are like our customers, you probably have a lot of time, intellectual capital and critical business rules living inside various Excel files. As more companies move to the cloud, the business intelligence wrapped up in Excel can present a huge problem.

• Do you build a custom program to replace the Excel calculations?
• Do you replace business flexibility from your analyst using Excel with a structured program that now requires programmers to make all of your business changes?
• Does it make sense, or more likely, it is possible to replicate what you have been doing in Excel in a cloud application or service?

At Drawloop, we recognize the value and power Excel provides virtually every business in the world. There is a real business need to keep your business analyst in charge rather than moving that role to programmers. Our document merge and automation service allows you to use your Excel files within any dynamic document package (DDP). Using Excel within a DDP allows your company to use Excel with other cloud services like Salesforce.com and Google Apps.

Here’s how you can use Excel with Drawloop:

1) Merge Data to Excel and include Output Sheets

Allows you to use Excel to (a) dynamically merge data from your CRM and/or web form and (b) present the desired output page(s) from Excel as a PDF with any other combination of documents. This gives you a secure process for creating your DDPs without exposing the Excel file(s) to the end user.

2) Use Excel as a Calc Engine

Allows you to use Excel as a calc engine to calculate the required “values” and then pass those values dynamically into your Word and/or PowerPoint documents. For example, you can merge data from Salesforce to Excel, run your amortization calculations, and then dynamically pass values from Excel into Word and/or PowerPoint. Powerful stuff!

Please contact us to learn how to use Excel in the Cloud!

So, here’s what you can do with a DDP:

1) Send your DDP to Content for delivery and tracking

Select “Send to Content” when running your DDP. Leveraging content delivery and tracking, you can send the customer or prospect a URL. The DDP is as easy to view and share as online photos—no downloading required. And you can track content views for more intelligent follow up.

Then, your prospect or customer receives an email with a URL link to view the DDP:

2) Template documents (docs with merge fields) from Content

This can help manage templates if you have to collaborate with multiple DDP admins. When building a DDP, you can drag and drop files from the Documents tab and now from Content Workspaces.

3) Store DDPs in Content Library

This is another storage option — store each DDP in Content rather than attaching back to the object using Salesforce storage or attaching back to the object using LOOP Storage.

AppExchange All-Star: view blog post
JP Seabury, New Hampshire User Group Leader

“When Sara Varni Bright (Sr. Marketing Manager, AppExchange) asked me to write an article on my favorite AppExchange apps, my first thought was “Oh my, where do I begin?” Then she said, “3-5 paragraphs would be ideal,” and my next thought was “Mission: Impossible.”

I currently work as Principal Salesforce.com Architect for Comcast, but I’ve also managed a Force.com technical consulting company and volunteered development / admin time for Salesforce Foundation grant recipients. I’ve downloaded and used more than 30 different apps, for various organizations. It is tough narrowing the list down, but here are my Top 5:

App: LOOP Document Services

Publisher:
Drawloop Technologies

Description:
Drawloop is an extremely powerful, highly flexible application that allows you to automate various types of documents. Have a PowerPoint presentation that you need to update monthly and deliver to your executive team? Don’t spend hours exporting the raw data from Salesforce, making it pretty in Excel graphs and then building a PowerPoint slidedeck! Use Drawloop to simplify that process to a click of a button – and let your management team get their weekly/monthly updates “on demand”. I’ve used Drawloop and DocuSign as a tool for getting customer survey feedback directly into Salesforce. It can also be used to automate price quotes, proposals, contracts, and more. The company has fantastic product support, as I commented on my AppExchange review of this product.”

The addition of Visualforce pages is another example of the power and flexbility of the DDP manager within Salesforce. We treat a visualforce page as just another document that you can “drag and drop” when building a DDP. This allows an admin to build business logic around Visualforce pages. This logic can be as simple as making a Visualforce page required or optional in a DDP or advanced by using Salesforce fields to determine whether or not to include the Visualforce page with the DDP.

Please contact us today with any questions or install the latest version of our LOOP Document Services from the AppExchange.