Drawloop Blog

AppExchange All-Star: JP Seabury

drawloop — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:39:17 +0000

Our team wanted to post a quick “thank you” to JP for the nice mention of Drawloop in his recent blog post on Salesforce.com. You can learn more about JP at his blog.

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.”

Reduce Document Storage Costs with Amazon S3 – all from within Salesforce

drawloop — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:30:41 +0000

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

DDPs with Visualforce Pages

drawloop — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:43:09 +0000

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.

Mail Merge in the Cloud: Power of Drawloop, Google Apps and Google Docs

drawloop — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:36:56 +0000

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!

Salesforce Doc Services: Pre-Release

drawloop — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:08:16 +0000

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.

Drawloop Receives Unexpected Surprise

tmpowell — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:42:39 +0000

Drawloop employees arrived to find fire trucks surrounding the building and other tower workers standing in the parking lot. Building officials announced there had been a fire on the third floor and the building had been evacuated. The local coffee shop was swarmed with people that could not get into their offices. Although the building was expected to be closed for at least 45 minutes, workers on the upper floors were allowed into the building before that time elapsed. Happily, according to the Orange County Register article (image credit: Ken Steinhardt, article credit: Salvador Hernandez), there were no injuries and our floor is no longer smoky.

On an unrelated note, a new version of LOOP Document Services for Salesforce is available on the AppExchange! A post on the new features will be coming soon. Also, we will be having cake.

Thoughts on Google I/O

Jonathan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:38:13 +0000

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since we got back from Google I/O. While at the conference, we had the opportunity to talk to developers both from Google and from other companies, and received quite a bit of good feedback. We’ve spent the last couple weeks starting plans to incorporate that feedback and finalize the next phase of our product road map.

The conference itself was a great experience. Talking to developers and seeing what’s coming down the line for businesses helped a lot with focusing our own ideas. We also enjoyed meeting Google Apps integrators. It was encouraging to receive confirmation that the direction we’ve been moving for our cloud-based document merge and automation service is exactly in the right direction.

I’m also enjoying the free Evo 4G we all were given a couple weeks early! Thanks Google!

Guest Blog Post: Google Code Blog

drawloop — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:10:52 +0000

Check out our guest blog post introducing Drawloop’s Mail Merge in the Cloud at Google I/O today!

Mail Merge in the Cloud with Google APIs

“Finally a tool to Mail Merge with Docs”

Visit us today in the Enterprise Developer Sandbox (# 4 – Enterprise Sandbox). You can meet some of our team, run a DDP and even redeem a Coupon. Learn how to dynamically create documents in the cloud . . . all from within Google Apps.

Mail Merge with Google Docs

Jonathan — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:00:43 +0000

Please stop by our booth at Google I/O and learn more about how you can automate document create and deliver mail merge in the cloud with Google Docs. Visit us in the Enterprise Developer Sandbox (# 4 – Enterprise Sandbox). You can meet some of our team, run a DDP and even redeem a Coupon. Learn how to dynamically create documents in the cloud . . . 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.

Send to Box Delivery Option

drawloop — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:11:05 +0000

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