Conga Composer is a document generation and automation tool designed to simplify and streamline the process of creating and distributing customized documents, presentations, and reports.
$30
per month per user
Drupal
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
From my experience, Conga Composer is particularly well-suited for generating documents, such as quotes and contracts, directly from Salesforce. It saves us a great deal of time, which is remarkably beneficial for companies with sales teams. Not suitable for companies lacking significant Salesforce expertise or administrative support.
If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.
This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.
Though I love how easily Conga Composer ties into Salesforce and its given analytics, it takes a lot of data entry to get up and running. I don't love that sometimes queries can take a long time to pull. I like keeping our marketing templates consistent via templates in the system. Pulling multiple objects into one report is fantastic too.
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
It's a fairly simple tool to integrate into your current business structure. When we've had issues, we were able to resolve them extremely quickly. The users click a button and it can bring in all the quote lines, and our credit application seamlessly into our tool. I'd definitely recommend it to other colleagues
As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.
Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
It's been hit and miss depending on the issue. We use javascript to generate the urls which has confused many techs even though it generates a clean url - they are overwhelmed by the concept of code and can't understand that the url is all that matters.
As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
I think Nintex is the primary competitor for Conga Composer, but I have not personally used it. I was not present for the decision to purchase Conga but I would recommend it in future document automation vendor selection processes because I have seen how well it works! We are especially fond of complementary features in Conga Composer, including Conga Email Templates and Conga Global Merge.
Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.
Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
Could really use better error handling on the product when the document doesn't generate. Zero notifications are provided right now and have no idea where in a 20 page template the error is. Need to keep cutting the template into pieces to find the error.
The report generates 90% of the time so far.
Getting easier to generate templates when knowing how the JSON will be structured to add to merged fields.
Use Work Plan Template Entries and Work Steps to dynamically generate many deliverables.
