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Several of my users are interested in using Conga Composer and I am trying to understand the typical use cases for the product. I get that you can make a nice-looking PDF-able and user-admin-able report. I'm sold.
Aside from that, though, even after reading documentation, I'm at a loss. Specifically, what do Conga Composer Solutions do? It looks like just Salesforce configuration on top of Salesforce. What is the typical use of them?
We use Conga Composer, so I can at least give you our use case.
For example, you have Contracts that get signed between yourself and a client with all the trimmings: customer headers and footers, images of your logo, branding and the wording itself. Now imagine the process of having to constantly edit that document to replace the name of the company signing into that contract, maybe different payment variables, the sort of stuff you'd store in Salesforce.
What Conga Composer does, for us, is using a Contract record and after entering in that information, generate a standard document in a Word or .pdf format that can then be sent off for signing.
You can use it for things like employee particulars (medical information, employee-business contracts, that type off stuff) when they start.
We even use it for checklists between ourselves and contractors (we're a recruitment company), so making sure we've ticked off having received proof of identification, checked we've got their right-to-work-in-[insert your country here] information, that type of stuff.
I guess the point is, rather than having to constantly go to a document and find and replace, you can click a button from a record in Salesforce to generate it for you.
The bonus is that rather than people relying on documents that sit outside of a centralised database (Salesforce) which could go missing, get stored improperly, generally cause headaches if you need it 5 years down the line, it's all there in Salesforce for you, a click away, with all your company branding.
In a nutshell, it's Microsoft Word's Mail Merge in Salesforce.
Incidentally, where I say:
sing a Contract record and after entering in that information, generate a standard document in a Word or .pdf format that can then be sent off for signing.
You might (rightly) say: "Why not use an electronic signature service?" Well as we found out, Docusign, an electronic signature company, work with Conga Composer for their product.
Conga Composer Solutions is simply another interface to build/create Conga Composer buttons. Generally, Conga Composer is authored as a custom button/link that resides on a Salesforce Record Detail page. Conga Composer Solution records serve as another (more UI based) method to build and manage that custom button/link in case an Admin is not comfortable building the button URL in Salesforce Setup.
Here's an article from Conga's support site regarding Conga Solution Manager and Conga Solution Packs: Creating Conga Composer Solutions
If you need any further assistance, I'm glad to engage directly.
-CongaPete
I've used Conga Composer for a few years. It's great as a middle to a signature service like Docusign and Adobe Sign (it used to be called Echosign). It allows you to do all the mail merge functionality within Salesforce without going outside to Word. This is good for things that you want to go out automatically as your users do not have to go out merge then add the merged doc to a salesforce email template for example.
Our use case was we generated the merged word doc with Conga then passed it over to Adobe for the signature portion. As it was all within Salesforce it happened automatically to the users so it was clean and seamless for them. There's a bit of setup from the admin before it all works but it saves a lot of time for the users.
