Drawloop Blog

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.”

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.

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.

Salesforce users rely on Drawloop to help them automate the creation of proposals, sales quotes, presentations and many other document packages critical to selling or servicing their products. Our on-demand services will allow you to deliver a one-click process for the creation of Dynamic Document Packages (DDPs).

We’re proud to have launched the most recent version of our document merge, automation and packaging service within Salesforce. We’re launching the latest version (v4.5) of LOOP Document Services today. The following is a summary of the new features available with LOOP Document Services:

Dynamic Ordering of Attachments
A powerful new feature is your ability to add and order any static or dynamic (doc contains merge fields) documents that have been uploaded to Notes & Attachments on an Object.

Dynamic ordering of attachments allows “ad hoc” or “custom” docs to be added to a DDP at run time.

Parameter Based Sections
All DDP Admins will love this new feature — parameter based DDP sections. In addition to making sections (pages) of a DDP optional to the user at run time, you can now quickly and easily have sections (pages) included or excluded based on field values.

Example: You want to include the Quote section of the DDP only when Account Level field value = Enterprise

Product Addendums
If you use Products and Product Line Items, you will appreciate the ability to dynamically add Product Addendums to DDPs. This new feature simplifies administration of DDPs while you are utilizing product line items in Word or Excel files.

Example: Sales rep has just added Product A, F and M to his new Opportunity. He clicks a button on the Opportunity to run his customized Sales Proposal. The DDP delivers to him a merged and customized Sales Proposal as a single PDF that also includes the addendums for the products he selected (A, F and M).

Mass DDPs
This new feature is extremely valuable a business use case where you need to send a DDP to hundreds of customers at the same time. DDPs can now be emailed, attached, downloaded, printed, and e-signed en masse with Mass DDPs.

Example: Tim needs to email a DDP to hundreds of Salesforce Contacts in a list view. He selects the contacts to be emailed, clicks Mass LOOPlus, selects the DDP he wants to send, and clicks Run. When the emails have finished being sent, Tim receives the Mass DDP results via email.

DDPs with DocuSign Embed Signing
This new feature was added to take advantage of business use cases where DDPs are created and delivered directly to DocuSign’s embedded signing process within a Force.com application or a Customer Portal.

We are excited to announce our Amazon S3 document storage service for Salesforce, called LOOP Storage Services. LOOP Storage Services offers document storage for Salesforce. It provides a simple interface to store and manage any files, at any time, from within a documents tab or within an object in Salesforce.

Features:

A simple interface to store and manage any files or documents, at any time, from within Salesforce

Use single or multiple folder hierarchies

Add security (profile, role, user or user group) and keywords to your stored documents

NO file size limits . . . unless 5GB is not enough per document

How It Works:

Salesforce Tab: Custom Documents tab allowing you to store and manage all of your documents – simply upload and organize your files

Documents in Objects: Allows you to store documents within objects. You can also organize with document folders inside the objects. Deployed for all standard objects – contact Drawloop for custom objects

Amazon S3: All of your documents are managed within Salesforce but are stored with Amazon S3

How To Get Started:

1) Install LOOP Storage Services from AppExchange

2) Sign-up for an Amazon S3 account

Drawloop is an AWS Solution Provider. The AWS Solution Providers Program serves a growing community of Independent Software Vendors and Systems Integrators that offer a rich set of solutions and consulting services on AWS.

Contact us today with any questions.

LOOP Document Services on Salesforce.com was recently recertified for AppExchange. Applications on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange that have earned a “certified” designation have met a higher set of standards. The AppExchange certification process includes extensive testing by Salesforce.com, as well as a security assessment of company policies, application and network infrastructure.

We continue to work with Salesforce.com customers in helping them automate works flow and other business processes around the creation and automation of what we call Dynamic Document Packages or DDPs.

Take a moment to learn why companies like KONE, ASCAP, LinkedIn Corporation and IntraLinks have leveraged our document automation service within their Salesforce platform.

We’ve recently launched the newest version of our document merge and automation services within Salesforce – LOOP Document Services 3.1. The following is a summary of cool new features, new integrations and a brief glimpse into our next releases.

Cool New Features

• LOOP Reports can now use dynamic values for advanced filtering
• LOOP Reports date last sent is now being tracked at the DDP level
• Developer and Sandbox accounts can now be authorized with the click of a button
• Mass Merge and automatically send emails to records (contacts, leads, opportunities, etc.) with LOOP Merge
• LOOP Merge now allows users to select an email template
• LOOPlus and LOOP Merge allow users to attach a DDP back to a record
• LOOPlus: specify related objects to be used in a DDP
• LOOPlus excluded standard delivery options are now hidden instead of disabled

New Integrations

• DocuSign Recipients can now be specified as required or not required.
• DocuSign Recipient Secure Fields and Envelope Custom Fields are now supported

Upcoming Releases

• Download PDF, original documents, or both
• Deployment Wizard

LOOP Document Services 3.0 went live on AppExchange today. As an active user of Salesforce, we often find ourselves looking for help within the Salesforce community or posting feature requests on the Salesforce Idea Exchange. While participating in this amazing community, we kept seeing ideas shared that related to documents (our expertise). Those ideas presented an opportunity for us to review our current document services (LOOP, LOOPlus and LOOP Reports) and see how we could incorporate real solutions to posts on Idea Exchange.

We are pleased to officially announce LOOP Merge – the answer to over thirty (30) Salesforce Ideas. LOOP Merge significantly enhances, compliments and extends the out-of-the-box Salesforce Mail Merge functionality.

Our Objectives:

Enhance the current Salesforce merge process

Improve maintenance and organization of merge templates

Support multiple browsers and operating systems

Extend merge to other applications and file types

Pricing: $4 per user/month (no minimum users)

Enhancements (11 ideas)

1. Increase File Size Limitation of 1MB: LOOP Merge allows you to upload your merge templates into the Salesforce documents tab which has a file size limit of 5MB. Like LOOPlus, you can also work with publicly accessible URL based documents which allow you to go beyond the 5MB limit if needed.
2. Date Formatting: All dates used by any of LOOP Document Service format the date using the long date format by locale.
3. Empty Fields: All fields that do not have values pass as a blank instead of “______”.
4. Ability to Select a Contact: Accounts, Cases, Opportunities and Contracts allow you to select contacts related to the object.
5. Customize the Button: You can easily deploy your own buttons and point to the LOOP Merge s-control.
6. Additional Delivery Options: You can Email, Email and Attach, Attach Only or send the Mail Merge Document to our free LOOP service where you can download or add any additional documents to the final merged PDF file.

Maintenance and Organization (7 ideas)

1. Folder Support: LOOP Merge allows you to upload your merge templates into the documents tab and store in any document folder – any security established within document folders will control access for available LOOP Merge documents.
2. Update and Tracking: Deploying templates in the documents tab also allows you to update and track templates.
3. Filter by Object: Document keyword tags allow you to limit documents by object.

Browser and OS Support (4 ideas)

1. Web Browsers: Our LOOP Document Services support Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome.
2. OS: Our LOOP Document Services support any OS that can run Firefox, IE, Safari or Chrome.

Applications and Document Types (11 ideas)

1. Additional Application Support: LOOP Merge works with Google Docs and Spreadsheets as well as OpenOffice. Although we work with the Saleforce Office Plugin, this is not a requirement for any of our services. Any document that can be saved as an Microsoft Office document can be used with our document services.
2. Additional Document Types: Works with Mail Merge Templates or any Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel (up to 2007 versions) or PDF file.

We are pleased to announce the beta release of LOOP Merge, our latest document automation service within Salesforce.com on AppExchange. Our service significantly extends and enhances the Salesforce Mail Merge. LOOP Merge automates your existing Salesforce.com Mail Merge Templates, any Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint file or any PDF file. We have streamlined the user experience to allow a user to click a button and then determine how to deliver the merged file as a PDF. You can Email, Email and Attach, Attach Only or send the Mail Merge Document to our free LOOP service where you can add any additional documents to the merged file.

Easily incorporate Salesforce data in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF documents. Use all of your sophisticated mail merge templates in Salesforce with LOOP Merge!

FEATURES:

Mail Merge Templates: Works with any Salesforce Mail Merge Template.

Web Browser: Works in any web browser (Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome), you are not limited to IE.

LOOP Merge Process:

1. Merge Document: Merge your document with Salesforce data. This includes any Mail Merge Template as well as any Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF file.
2. Converts to PDF: The merged document automatically converts to a PDF file.
3. Delivery Options: You control the delivery options for the merged document. You can send the merged PDF document to (i) email, (ii) email and attach (goes to email and automatically attaches the PDF file to the object), (iii) attach only, or (iv) LOOP It (our free document service to add any additional documents, page order and then deliver as one combined PDF).

Additional Document Types: Works with Mail Merge Templates or any Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel (up to 2007 versions) or PDF file.

Security: Any security established within Document Folders will control access for LOOP Merge documents.

Merge Documents by Object: You can tag documents to limit “merge templates” available per object. For example, a document tagged as a Lead will only show up as a merge template within Leads.

PRICING:
LOOP Merge is available for $4 per user / month (Enterprise and Unlimited only) – no user minimum. We will be announcing a LOOP Merge promotion for existing and new customers in early November.

Contact us today to learn more about LOOP Merge.

We are excited to announce the new release of LOOP Reports within our Salesforce.com document automation service. You can automate and schedule the email delivery of Salesforce.com reports as one combined file. A powerful feature of LOOP Reports is your ability to dynamically send Salesforce.com reports into an Excel file allowing you to create any required analytics. The end result is a scheduled email report designed, calculated and structured to meet the unique needs and requirements for your reps, managers and executives.

Do you need to customize your scheduled Salesforce.com reports?
No problem. We work with CRM Advantage who provides both training and professional services for LOOP Reports.

We encourage you to install our free trial from AppExchange to begin automating and scheduling your Salesforce.com reports.