Drawloop Blog

We recently helped a Salesforce.com customer move over 120 gigabytes of documents to LOOP Storage (our document storage solution for Salesforce). The seamless integration of LOOP Storage within Salesforce combined with the competitive pricing of Amazon S3 made this transition a “win-win” for the customer! The transition to LOOP Storage delivered improved document management, integration, and document security while saving over 95% in document storage expense.

Storage as it should be . . .
by John Johnson
“This is an incredible tool that seamlessly integrates our Amazon S3 storage account with our instance of Salesforce.com. The support staff and development team at Drawloop also provided us with custom tools that allow us to batch upload files as our operations require. The app is very intuitive for users and is priced right! Ease of use, priced right and excellent support.”

LOOP Storage Demo:

Install our free trial on AppExchange

With the latest release of our document services within Salesforce, you can now add any Visualforce pages to your dynamic document package (DDP). A DDP includes one or more documents that will be merged with data from any Salesforce object and packaged into one single document for delivery. As an example, your sales contract is a DDP.

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.

We recently had the pleasure of helping a new customer deploy their document merge and automation needs on Google Apps. Our document merge service was the perfect solution to complete an important missing piece for the customer who had moved from the “desktop” to the “cloud” for all of its business needs.

Drawloop DDP – great tool that works very well!!
by Craig Schurter
“The Drawloop DDP service works great. We used mail merge in the past (word 2007), but this method is much more streamlined, quicker, and can be used by our team from any computer. The service and support has also been great. Thanks guys!”

Take a moment to explore what’s possible with Drawloop on Google Apps and with Google Docs!

The Summer release of our LOOP Document Services for Salesforce is now available on the AppExchange to allow any of your users to test the latest version of LOOPlus. The Summer release includes exciting and powerful new features like Visualforce pages in DDPs, out-of-the-box Real-Time Quotes integration, and significant performance enhancements.

HIGHLIGHTS

1) Visualforce Pages

Now, you can treat any visualforce page as a document or section in your DDP. This allows your organization to include a cover letter, sales quote or sales contract with your visualforce pages. Because we treat a visualforce page just like any other document, you can leverage all of the business logic and intelligence available to any dynamic document package (DDP).

2) Real-Time Quotes

Real-time quotes provides an easy way for your Salesforce users to generate quotes for customers. Our new DDP integration with Real-Time Quotes allows you to expand this functionality to include additional elements which are often part of a sales quote – things like a cover letter, a product exhibit, terms & conditions. Again, this combines the power of Salesforce with the power of real-time document packaging.

In addition to integrating with the real-time quote PDFs, we also allow you to include Quote and Quote Line Item data in any DDP merge files (Word, Excel or PowerPoint).

3) UI for Advanced DDP Logic

We have created a point-and-click interface to relate multiple object relationships to a DDP. This includes any one-to-many object relationship or look-up to an object. This new UI has a familiar interface to filter and sort on those related objects. This delivers the best of DDPs with Salesforce filtering while keeping the simplicity of document tagging.

4) DDP Routing Options

We have expanded DDP routing options allowing our customers to not only dynamically create the document packages required to sell and service their products, but equally important, deliver their DDPs based on required business rules. DDPs can be routed as follows:

- Email
- 3rd Party SMTP service
- Any external web form (web service)
- Outbound messaging
- Work flows (like approvals)
- Scheduled reports (e.g. every Monday at 8:00am)
- Document storage (Amazon S3)
- Electronic Signature (DocuSign)
- Document Queue (for 3rd party fulfillment)
- LOOP (DDP output with ad hoc files)
- Download
- Attach as attachment, activity history, LOOP Storage

5) Performance Enhancements

Our development team has been working hard to improve the DDP user experience. We are pleased to pass along these improvements with our Summer release. With some changes and enhancements to our document merge and packaging service, our pre-release tests show a 20% to 50% improvement in performance.

Please contact us with any questions or if you need assistance from support to test the pre-release.

Our team has just added yet another cloud delivery option for our document merge service on Google Apps, send to box.net. Our seamless document merge service for Google Docs within Google Apps allows your sales and service reps to create customized documents and mail merge in the cloud.

Our latest DDP delivery option provides a simple and easy way for users to work with Drawloop, Box and Google Apps.

Learn more about our latest integration on Google Apps with Box.net at Google I/O – visit us in the Enterprise Developer Sandbox (# 4 – Enterprise Sandbox). You can run a DDP and redeem a Coupon at Box.net (# 1 – Google APIs Sandbox). Learn how to dynamically create documents in the cloud and send the output to Box.net . . . all from within Google Apps.

Developer Sandbox @ Google I/O

The Developer Sandbox, first introduced at I/O 2009, is the demo area at Google I/O where Google features a wide range of developers who have built applications based on technologies and products featured at I/O.

Representing large and small companies, individual developers, and a diverse collection of apps, these developers will be participating in the Sandbox to demo their applications, answer questions, and exchange ideas.

westbrook International, our EMEA partner, has put together a nice demo reviewing some of their customer implementations leveraging our document merge and automation service within Salesforce.

Watch Now

The integrations highlight westbrook’s knowledge of our document services to leverage efficiency and functionality within Salesforce.

westbrook provides the business expertise and technical knowledge to implement document automation solutions to guarantee time and cost savings. Thanks westbrook for the great work! You can learn more about westbrook International by visiting their website at http://www.wigroup.com.

Our team is excited to announce a new DDP (“Dynamic Document Package”) delivery option for Google Apps – “View/Email”. Our seamless document merge service for Google Docs within Google Apps allows your sales and service reps to create customized documents and mail merge in the cloud.

DDP Delivery Options

You can deliver the DDP output as (i) Download, (ii) Original merged document(s), (iii) Send to Google Docs, and now, (iv) View/Email. We encourage you to install a 30-day free trial to start merging your documents in the cloud!

The “View/Edit” DDP delivery option allows users to email the merged DDP as an attachment through Gmail. We will be announcing additional Google Apps features later this week. Please contact us with any questions.

You can also visit our support site for Google Apps to learn more.

This week, Salesforce.com announced Aloha Apps. Aloha Apps* don’t count against your system limits for apps, tabs, and objects—no matter which salesforce.com edition** you’re using. If you are familiar with system limits on Salesforce, the decision to add an application to your Salesforce org was often impacted due to number of objects, apps and/or tabs used in the org.

Drawloop is pleased to be an Aloha App on Salesforce. Again, this means you can install and deploy our powerful document services without any impact on your Salesforce org. We encourage you to learn how our document merge and automation service can be deployed for your entire organization. Thinking about deploying a Force.com application? Add our powerful document features within your Force App.

Contact us today for more information.

With our document merge and automation service (LOOP Document Services) on the AppExchange, you can merge data from Salesforce Real-Time Quotes into your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. The Winter ‘10 release introduced Real-Time Quotes to Salesforce customers to help reps use Salesforce CRM to create sales quotes.

At Drawloop, we see Real-Time Quotes (which is a visuaforce page) as just another document. This new document type will be introduced soon on our Salesforce document merge service allowing Admin’s to build a dynamic document package using any combination of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files along with any Visualforce Page(s).

Our enterprise customers typically need more than one document in their document packages. A sales quote for example can include a cover letter and other collateral documents about the product or service. With Drawloop, you can quickly package the required documents combining the power of Salesforce Real-Time Quotes with all of your other required documents wrapped up in a simple DDP! Need business intelligence around which document or documents get included in your package? No problem – learn more.

Contact us today to learn more.

Our team continues to work hard expanding our integrations and “mashups” with other cloud technologies. One interesting integration relates to Box.net and how our OpenBox service can easily be deployed and integrated to the Box.net Gmail Gadget.

We continue to aggressively integrate with cloud technologies to help our document automation enterprise customers seamlessly work in the cloud for all of their business needs. These integrations have allowed our document automation services to expand functionality for the benefit of all users who have embraced the cloud. For example, with our Box.net and Google Apps integrations, we can now offer our customers cloud content management, collaboration and communication services while keeping our focus on document creation and automation.

Gmail + Box.net + Drawloop

The Box.net Gmail gadget is located in the left-hand sidebar of your Gmail account, where you can access all your Box files and folders, as well as utilize the Drawloop OpenBox service.

Box.net Gmail Gadget Set-up

Step 1:
Log into Gmail -> Settings -> Labs -> Enable “Add any gadget by URL”

If you don’t have Labs enabled in Gmail / Google Apps, click here.

Step2:
Settings -> Gadget -> past in the URL below

http://www.box.net/google_gadget/gmail/gadget_specs.xml

Now, you are ready to use the integration between Gmail, Box.net and Drawloop. From the Box.net Gmail Gadget, simply select the file or files you want to convert and/or combine to a single PDF and right-click to do so with Drawloop. When complete, you can right-click to send as a link through Gmail.

Requirements:

- Box.net Account (sign-up now)
- Drawloop OpenBox Service (sign-up now)
- Google Apps (sign-up now)

We continue to expand and strengthen our cloud integrations on a daily basis. We will be announcing some exciting new enhancements and features for Google Apps soon!