Drawloop Blog

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.