Drawloop as a Compliment to Visualforce Pages

Since 2010, our customers have been able to use any Visualforce page as part of their Dynamic Document Package (DDP). The DDP simply treats the Visualforce page like any other document. With this capability, the DDP Admin can build document packages using any combination of template documents to make up the final DDP — a Visualforce page can be required, optional or included in the final DDP with advanced logic referencing Salesforce field values.

A common use case is when a company wants to include a cover letter with a Visualforce page and/or needs to include T&Cs (Word doc) with a Visualforce quote. With DDPs, it’s an easy drag and drop of the various documents to include before or after the Visualforce page. This integration provides you with maximum flexibility around all of your dynamic document creation.

Drawloop as an Alternative to Visualforce Pages

We have also seen customers look to Drawloop as an alternative to Visualforce pages. As requirements become more complex and customization is needed, the power of leveraging DDPs with a Word, Excel and/or PowerPoint template can provide a more cost-effective solution. Visualforce pages will often become difficult to manage around headers, footers, and customizations required for different products, channels or regions.

For example, a company needs flexibility on their quote to customize per channel and has merge requirements that often run the PDF document beyond one page where formatting needs create a programming challenge and/or lack of professionalism in the resulting Visualforce page PDF document. Drawloop’s merge capabilities to any combination of Word, Excel and PowerPoint often eliminate the need for Visualforce programming and, instead, leverage native functionality that exists in the template document itself.

Please contact us today to learn more about how to use Visualforce pages with DDPs or as an alternative to Visualforce pages.

We know that Dynamic Document Packages, or DDPs, have helped our clients generate and deliver documents they use every day. Companies across the world are using our services to automate their contracts, letters, quotes, servicing documents, proposals, and much more. Because of the global reach of our services, it has come to our attention that to help empower DDP users of other languages, they should be able to read the instructions provided to run a DDP. That is why, in the latest release of LOOP Document Services (version 5.5 on the AppExchange) we have provided administrators the ability to translate many text elements displayed when running a DDP.

To get started translating your DDP run page, you will need to enable your organization’s translation workbench and start adding languages (Salesforce Setup – Administration Setup – Translation Workbench – Translation Settings). All of the DDP run options that can be translated are in Setup – App Setup – Create – Custom Labels. Click on the linked Name of any item you want to translate, then click New Local Translations / Overrides.

Let us know how we can help you automate the documents you use everyday in any language, country, or region necessary for your business needs.

With LOOP Document Services, you can leverage Excel as middleware to run dynamic calculations at run time. Picture an Excel file that gives you a series of calculated numbers (or text values) in cells B20, C20 and D20. You can have the calculated numbers dynamically merged from cells B20, C20 and D20 in your Excel file to a Quote summary (.doc or .ppt) file.

Some examples include:

1) Use Excel for Internal Pricing Calcs

Perhaps you need to run a DDP for internal purposes that provides management with profit margins and other internal pricing metrics based on Sales Quotes generated by all of the sales reps. All of the confidential pricing metrics are calculated in an Excel file at DDP run time (never exposed to anyone) and merged to an internal Pricing Summary for management.

2) Use Excel for Complicated Formulas

A financial institution provides DDPs to financial service representatives to run analytics for customers. The financial institution uses a combination of Salesforce values and Excel calculations to generate the Customer Profile Summary. The Excel file contains calculations and metrics to take in assumption data from Salesforce and then run all of the required calculations in Excel.

Please contact us today to schedule a time to learn more about how your organization can leverage our document service using Excel as middleware.

Business Requirement:

Dave needed to dynamically create his “Weekly Deal Summary” spreadsheet using data from Salesforce.com for all of the stakeholders at Austin Ventures. Many of the stakeholders are mobile and need to access the Weekly Deal Summary from a mobile device (smart phone / iPad). In order to track the history and provide easy “download and view” capabilities, Dave wanted to have the spreadsheet stored on Salesforce and on Box.net.

Solution:

Dave created “Send to Box Folder” as a new DDP Delivery Option.

By leveraging our “Send to Box” integration for DDPs within Salesforce, Dave was able to automate (i) the dynamic creation of his Weekly Deal Summary and (ii) the automatic storage of the document on Box.net where all of the stakeholders can view the document at anytime.

Nice work Dave and a very creative new use case for our Box integration within Salesforce!

Administrative Steps to Create “Send to Box Folder”:

DDP Steps:

1) Add a New Delivery Option

Select “Email” delivery option and name it “Send to Box Folder”

2) Check to email the DDP to “Internal Email” which will enable the DDP creation via Salesforce email without the need for a Contact at run time (you can run from a button click or Salesforce workflow)

3) Copy and paste the Box Folder email address into the “Additional To” field

Box Steps:

1) Create a new Box folder or go to an existing Folder

2) Click Folder Options and select “Folder Properties | Advanced Properties”

3) Click on “Email Options” and the select “Allow uploads to this folder via email”

Now, you are ready to get the unique Box Folder email address. To get the address, go to “Folder Properties” and then select the “General” tab. You will see the Folder Email Address at the bottom.

Contact us to learn more about our document merge and creation services within Salesforce as well as how to extend DDP delivery to Box.

Salesforce Knowledge Article Files

Knowledge Article files can be found as a related list under Cases. Dynamic Document Packages (DDPs) can now include Knowledge Article files as part of the elements that will go into the final packaged PDF file.

DDP with Knowledge Articles Files

1) Select your DDP to run

2) Select which Knowledge Article files to include and you can then organize the order of the articles

3) Run the DDP

Please contact us to learn more about integrating Knowledge Article files with your DDP.

Some of our newest features will be highlighted at Dreamforce:

1) Introduce dynamic document creation to Chatter

2) Mobile document creation on an iPad

3) Use dynamic forms with DDPs (capture/update to Salesforce)

4) Automated DDPs – Use DDPs with workflows and Apex Triggers

5) Powerful new Salesforce merge features for Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Please visit Booth 27 in the Cloud Expo! We would love to say hello and walk you through how your organization can leverage DDPs for all your document needs, discover exciting new DDP features and enhancements, and check out DDPs on an iPad!

Dreamforce – Booth 27
Aug 30 – Sept 2, 2011
Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA

We encourage you to take 5 minutes to learn how you can help your company save countless hours! Learn why Salesforce customers like ASCAP, KONE, Scheider Electric, HTC, IntraLinks, 24 Hour Fitness, CIGNA, LinkedIn, DuPont, Iron Mountain, DocuSign and Citi rely on Drawloop to dynamically create their critical document packages!

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.

Salesforce Blog Post

Luke Cushanick is a certified developer and advanced admin and directs a team of admins and developers building orgs for 2tor, Inc. He is the leader of the NYC Developer Users Group and is expanding the Salesforce community in NYC through user groups, virtual communities and presentations to technical training institutes. You can also follow him on Twitter: @alwaysthinkin.

LOOPlus and LOOP Reports from Drawloop Technologies

“We started with LOOPlus as a solution to automating the creation and delivery of DocuSign docs. Using only workflow, we built a solution that determines the appropriate document and attachments, merges the unique fields into the text and sends as the appropriate user. The integration with DocuSign has allowed us to enroll new students with minimum delay, paperwork and cost.”

Install latest release

DDP NEW FEATURES

• Send to Box.net
  DDP admins can now select Box.net as a delivery and storage option for Dynamic Document Packages (DDPs). This integration helps extend out collaboration and sharing of DDPs through Box.net. This new delivery option requires an install of Box.net

• Send DDP to Chatter

  LOOP 5.3 allows you to send messages to Chatter when DDPs are run and also send the DDP file as a Chatter attachment. Click here to learn more.

• DDP Stamping

  This powerful new feature allows you to stamp your DDP PDFs. Some examples include page numbers – which is powerful in that a DDP can include any combination of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Salesforce Quotes and Visualforce Pages – and watermarks.

• Include Merge Fields in Attachments

  DDPs allow selected Salesforce attachments to include merge fields. For example, if you have “ad hoc” documents to include with DDPs, you can upload them to attachments and then include with any DDP that “allows” attachments. The attachment can include any merge fields.

• Send DDP to FTP

  You can now include an attachment option to automatically or optionally send your DDPs to your FTP server to be stored. You can also specify dynamic folders so a DDP can be stored within a specific folder on your FTP server.

• Dynamic Images

  We have extended our dynamic image feature to allow you to include dynamic image merge fields in headers within your DDP Word template documents. This is helpful for dynamic branding or other uses for images within headers.

FORM DDPs

A powerful new feature of DDPs is the ability to use dynamic forms with any DDP. The latest version of LOOP Document Services includes Forms. To create forms, you simply place double brackets at the beginning and end of any text (or range name) you would like to convert to a web form on Salesforce. The DDP manager includes a new form edit feature where you can change any field and field label.

When do you use Form DDPs?

Many of our enterprise customers have a need to capture additional data to dynamically merge to a DDP at runtime, but do not want to create a field or store the data in Salesforce. Form DDPs provide the same enterprise level automation and compliance control and simply add functionality to capture required information for document creation.

DDPs with DocuSign

• Multiple DocuSign Accounts

  Allows an admin to associate multiple DocuSign accounts to different users within the same Salesforce.com org.

• DocuSign Templates by Template ID

  DDPs now integrate directly with DocuSign templates by referencing the Template ID from the DocuSign Console. This DDP deployment provides easier integration with DocuSign templates.

Customer Success – Reduced Document Generation by 90%