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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 recently had the pleasure of completing an exciting new deployment for Expedia that combines the power of Salesforce, Drawloop and DocuSign. The integrated solution allows Salesforce users to create and package multiple documents for execution merging over 500 Salesforce fields . . . all with the click of a button!

Drawloop’s document integration technology is suberb!
by Gene Harden, Expedia
“I needed a solution to combine Salesforce field data into multiple documents to send to our hotel suppliers. The suppliers could then update and add additional information and sign the document using Docusign. After all that was finished, I needed all the data and documents back into Salesforce. To complicate the issue, one of the documents has close to 500 fields. Drawloop pulled all of this together! If you need to manage your documents and their contents, then contact Drawloop. Beyond having a great application their support and tech staff is just outstanding.”

Thanks Gene!

Our team has been working hard to incorporate the latest features of Salesforce Winter ‘10 with our dynamic document creation (DDP) service. Below we have highlighted some of the upcoming enhancements for DDPs that can help you take advantage of new features in Salesforce’s Winter ‘10 release:

Real Time Quotes
Add Salesforce Quotes to your DDPs. This allows you to add a Salesforce Quote along with your other required documents like a proposal (.doc), a product data sheet (.pdf) and product terms and conditions (.doc) . . . delivering one packaged document to your prospective or existing customer.

Example: ACME has deployed Real-Time Quotes for Salesforce, but the Director of Sales wants to include a cover letter, company overview and product slick.  These documents also need contact information (Salesforce data) merged into the documents.  LOOPlus works with Real-Time Quotes and includes all of the additional merged documents as a single PDF for delivery.

Product Addendums

Upload your product addendums to the Salesforce document tab and tie them to your products in your product library. This can be useful when you need to include in your DDP a product info sheet for each Product added under an Opportunity.

Example: ACME has leveraged Saleforce Opportunity Line Items and Products, but at run time wants to include a detailed product specification sheet when the proposal is generated.

Capture Data to Salesforce

Email the DDP (.pdf) to your contact; he or she then completes the PDF form fields and returns the completed PDF via email. By leveraging Salesforce email services, the data will automatically update fields in Salesforce or create new records. This can be tied to various work flows as well as tied to other DDP generation.

DDPs with Visualforce Pages
Like adding a Salesforce quote to a DDP, you can add any Visualforce page to a DDP. This is a powerful feature providing you with the ability to add additional documents or collateral to any Visualforce page.

Salesforce Tasks or Workflows with DDPs
Create a Salesforce task, update a Salesforce record or trigger a workflow when a DDP is created and delivered. This is extremely useful for generating invoices, proposals, sales contracts and other document packages that require a “next action” upon delivery of the DDP.

Mass DDPs
Send DDPs en masse directly from a Contact (Opportunity, Case, Contract, etc.) List View. You can deliver Mass DDPs through email, attach back to Salesforce, attach back to Salesforce with LOOP Storage or log the DDP as an Activity History.

Attachments with DDPs
Order attachments with your DDP. This powerful new feature allows users to not only add attachments to a DDP but also to order the attachments at run time. This is often used for incorporating redlined terms and conditions with a DDP.