Following January’s Appexchange app of the month, February’s app is Conga Composer from AppExtremes. In my experience this is a must-have extension for most Salesforce.com customers.
Every organisation has a handful of documents that must be recreated over and over again for customers, suppliers, partners and employees. Common examples include non-disclosure agreements, sales quotes or statements of work. This is often a tedious process of making a copy of the last document of that type, keying in the new information and double checking before you send it out to ensure no mistakes were made.
A slight inconvenience for an ad-hoc document becomes a royal pain when it’s regularly large volumes. Never mind the hassle of storing and retrieving those documents sometimes months or years later. Creating and managing these documents can be very time consuming.
As is the theme with these reviews, there is a much better way. Conga Composer sets up standard templates for common documents which are automatically filled by data from salesforce.com at the push of a button.
Here’s a video that shows how it works.
Once sent documents are stored with the contact’s details for simple search and retrieval, which also scans the documents’ contents. This dramatically improves visibility of documents you send out as a business.
Imagine one of the sales team being able to see the entire history of every quote that has been sent out to a customer, when they were sent and to whom. Document histories are also included in Salesforce.com reporting.
One often overlooked area is how apps are supported once installed. Conga support, provided by the AppExtremes team, is second to none.
I have found Conga to be a cost-effective way to make business processes more efficient. It’s well worth checking out.
Have you used Conga? Post your experiences in the comments below.
Next month: Echosign kills off the fax machine, the document courier and the scanner simultaneously!
Image credit: Conga Composer
