A review of the SalesForce.com Template Editor
When the Salesforce.com Spring 10 release hit sales organizations last year, we finally had the ability to generate a quote and send it via a PDF to a customer, using native functionality called Quotes. The process was designed to take the user from the opportunity, to the quote page, to generating a PDF to emailing to the customer in seamless process. Pertinent information is automatically brought over from the opportunity record to the quote page (which can also be adjusted to capture needed information for the template). The quote is than saved and ready to generate a PDF from a template you choose. This process by design encourages that any all data need to generate a quote be captured in Salesforce.com to be easily accessed and placed on the template, a time savings we can all appreciate.
Many of these same organizations wanted to move to this long awaited tool but quickly found the ability manage or fully edit the quote template itself very limited. This was especially an issue for those wanting to use preexisting content developed and available in current quote documents. These ranged from simple word docs, to merge process docs, to third party created templates.
The recent Winter 11 release gave sales organizations a new and improved quote template editor. Here are some things we were happy to see. The editor uses the same interface and functionality as seen in the object page layout editors, and that means:
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A highly intuitive navigation palate.
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Drag and drop capabilities to easily add graphics, text, sections and insert standard and custom fields.
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You can easily create separate sections on the template, with each section providing one or two columns to organize the content.
- Multiple templates can be created and made available for organizations that need more than one version.
Below is a screen shot of the editor and a field, in this case, the Text/Image Field being easily dragged on to the template.
You can easily copy and paste text or in this case upload a company logo and and place it were needed.
However, there are some limitations in this current version of the editor that make it not as robust as native AppExchange apps like Conga Composer. A few limitations we found -
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While helping clients build a template from scratch or inserting existing content from other documents, we found that text, graphics and fields can only be displayed in a one or two column format. Converting from other quote documents that have more elaborate offsets and alignments is not possible.
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The Header and footers are used on each page and cannot be removed, causing the same content on the first page to be in the following pages. In one example our client wanted the company logo on the first page not proceeding pages so the workaround was to forgo the header and create a new section…
- A client had a need for the Tax and Discount fields to show on the quote PDF only if they actually had values. We found that the Tax field has this characteristic and needs to be populated to be seen. The discount field on the other hand, appears on the quote regardless if it has a value or not. The work around involved the creation of a custom discount to be used on the opportunity record and quote page with a formula to make the field not visible in the template if the value is null.
Since the template is being generated natively and allows for management and editing without custom code, it can be a valuable tool for sales teams in the right circumstances. In future posts, we’ll explore the Conga Composer as a more robust alternative.