Conga Composer: Appexchange App of the Month
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
About Andy Pattinson
Andy Pattinson is an expert in CRM and business operations and comments regularly on cloud computing and salesforce.com for a number of IT and business publications.
I don’t get it. Can’t you just do the same thing with Word templates?
Hi Danny,
Conga Composer actually makes use of Word documents as the template file type (additionally, you may utilize Excel, PowerPoint, PDF Forms, and HTML Email body as supported template types). These templates are configured by the system administrator and stored in salesforce.com for use by the team. Many customers configure their solutions so that everything including convert to PDF, attach to salesforce.com, file naming, email, and activity history all take place with a single button-click. Conga Composer also supports 1-click integration with other popular AppExchange tools like DocuSign, EchoSign and SpringCM.
Ok, thanks. Sounds pretty neat.
How much tech knowledge do you need to set up Conga Composer? Is it easy enough that a business owner or receptionist could do it?
Just thinking about which person in an SME usually creates templates in Word, etc. Some businesses might not like having to hire a specialist/programmer every time they need a new form?
Hi Sholto,
As long as the user is a Salesforce administrator and has a working knowledge of Microsoft Office technologies, you’re about 90% of the way there. There is no programming required, just simple configuration of a Salesforce button. We have some tips and tricks that we’re willing to impart as part of our support and will help to walk you through setup. So as long as your receptionist is a Salesforce Admin with a little bit of experience with Office, then yes, your receptionist could become your internal Conga Composer resource.