A unique and meaty product on the SF ecosystem
March 14, 2018

A unique and meaty product on the SF ecosystem

Simon Whight | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Conga Composer

Overall Satisfaction with Conga Composer

Conga Composer actually came bundled as part of a FinancialForce implementation. It was used as a solution to create sales invoices, sales credit notes, and remittances.

It solves the issue you can have with Salesforce when you wish to pull information into documents that can be conditional or tabled information that is held in related lists. This is without the need to move into Visualforce and Apex coding.

Pros

  • Deals with complex merges of data into a document.
  • Integrates into Salesforce, rather than sitting as a separate program.
  • Works well with other pieces of software like Adobe Sign and Financial Force.

Cons

  • While it is a much easier experience than using code to arrive at a document solution, it can still get VERY technical. Beyond the click and drag style of document that you see in the demonstrations.
  • When it goes wrong, finding out WHERE it has gone wrong can be maddening. There is a lot of support out there but that sometimes translates to a vast amount of options to investigate when troubleshooting.
  • It basically suits a niche which would be unachievable without it.
  • Being bundled with FinancialForce, the ROI is hard to determine, as it is gauged against the parent program.
  • Would there have been a business case for the software without FinancialForce? I'm not sure. I've never quite reached that tipping point to recommend it.
Adobe Sign is good for document creation, but is obviously far more limited in terms of what it can pull in terms of formatting and data. It is particularly janky when using Word documents and needs to use PDFs to get the maximum out of it.

Steelbrick is good for quotations as it comes built in, so it is possibly better to use the inherent software rather than cobble together a bunch of solutions.
It is useful when you are dealing with complex data merges. For example, making a document that references a parent object, pulls in a table of information from a related object, displays certain pieces of information conditionally. Imagine terms and conditions where you want certain ones to appear in certain scenarios, or if you wanted to pull in a list of itemised items from a related object off an account (i.e. show all related Account Sites from a custom Site object).

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