Blog

The Salesforce AppExchange is one of the most important places a business using Salesforce can go (barring maybe the help section of the Trailblazer Community!). Its 5,000+ solutions -- which include applications, application components, community and automation templates, and database integrations -- allow Salesforce customers to enhance, extend, and evolve their Salesforce functionality to solve virtually any business challenge.

While the breadth and diversity of the AppExchange offers something for everyone, it also requires businesses to carefully consider which apps are right for them. The quality and complexity of Salesforce AppExchange apps varies widely, especially when it comes to the crucial vetting and implementation process.

The benefits of discovering a great new business solution will be negated if the app doesn’t pass your organization’s security review. And an app that takes months to implement, or doesn’t fit into your Salesforce environment correctly, won’t grant you much ROI. Vetting/implementations gone wrong can reduce executive buy-in, stagnate user adoption, and nullify the benefits the app was supposed to bring to the table.

So how can you find quality apps that also make vetting and implementation a breeze?

You Might Also Like: How 2009 Changed the Salesforce AppExchange Forever

Not All Apps Are Created Equal

Salesforce AppExchange apps can be boiled down to two categories: native apps and non-native apps.

Non-native apps:

• Are built on external clouds and interfaced to Salesforce through APIs
• Require authorization of 3rd-party web connectors so data can be sent between Salesforce and the app’s servers
• Aren’t necessarily built for Salesforce exclusively, and may function on other platforms

Native apps:

• Are built entirely on the Salesforce platform
• Process all data within Salesforce and never require data to be sent off-platform
• Are built exclusively for Salesforce

Native apps allow you to accelerate the solution implementation process because they are built on the Salesforce platform, exclusively for Salesforce.

Don’t believe us? Just take a look at S-Docs, the only 100% native document generation and e-signature solution available on the AppExchange. Because of our native architecture, our customers are able to get set up and start seeing ROI immediately. G2 even awarded us these shiny badges for the Winter 2021 Salesforce CRM Document Generation Implementation Index!

But if that’s not enough for you, let’s get into the details on why native Salesforce applications can be implemented faster and start benefiting their customers before they’re even deployed to production.

You Might Also Like: How Native Salesforce Apps Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

1. Security Vetting is Easier with Native Salesforce Apps

Like we said before, native Salesforce apps are built on the Salesforce platform (formerly known as the force.com platform, now rebranded as the Lightning platform). This means that, quite simply, native apps never send customer data outside of Salesforce. Everything is 100% processed, delivered, and stored on Salesforce servers.

Since Salesforce has already been vetted and approved as a secure application, businesses evaluating native apps don’t have to worry about going through another lengthy platform assessment. Native apps run on the platform that they’ve already validated.

This can be especially liberating for IT teams in security-conscious industries like government, healthcare, or financial services.

2. Native Apps Require Zero Third-Party Integrations

Once you’ve installed an app into Salesforce, the last thing you want to worry about is jumping back out and configuring different accounts and connectors on third-party websites. Dealing with an entire separate interface, not to mention configuring APIs correctly, can be incredibly challenging, frustrating, and time-consuming.

Luckily, native apps allow you to skip all that. Once your native app is installed in your org (which only takes a few clicks from the AppExchange), the rest of the configuration steps happen right there where you work everyday. And there’s no need to get approval for third-party remote site authorization, since native apps function entirely within Salesforce.

You Might Also Like: [Datasheet] Native Salesforce App Architecture and Benefits

3. Native Apps Are Built Using Tools You Know

Even if you’re not a developer, you are probably familiar with the terms Apex, Visualforce, and custom objects. These are standard Salesforce development and customization tools -- your business likely has a few of them working in your org today. They’re also exactly what native apps are built with.

Because of this, native apps are much easier for Salesforce IT teams to implement -- they’re structured in a familiar way. Native apps also tend to mirror Salesforce’s look and feel, making the implementation process that much easier.

If you’re using a consulting firm to assist with your Salesforce implementation, native apps make their lives easier too. Salesforce consultants are Salesforce experts, so they’ll know exactly how to set up and navigate your app from day one.

4. Application Tests Are Faster with Native Apps

Every new Salesforce application that you download will likely need to go through testing in a sandbox org.

Whether your requirements necessitate one or one-thousand tests, native apps make it easier. For one, since they’re designed specifically for Salesforce, most native apps will allow you to easily migrate your application data from sandbox to production. Once testing is complete, you won’t lose any work and you can begin solving business problems with your app immediately.

In addition, native apps simply run faster. They operate entirely within your Salesforce environment, meaning that you don’t have to wait for web traffic between different clouds. This can exponentially speed up the testing process since you won’t be constantly stuck waiting for your app to process data. It will also probably reduce your stress levels, too.

You Might Also Like: How to Evaluate the Security of AppExchange Apps

5. Users Will Adopt Native Apps Faster

Users will only adopt a product if it helps them achieve a goal or makes their lives easier. If the product is too complex, takes too long to learn, or just doesn’t fit into their workflows, the likelihood of your business seeing ROI from it drops significantly.

Since native apps are built using the same building blocks as many of the other tools that Salesforce users interact with everyday, adoption will be a much easier process. Users will feel more comfortable learning and using a native app, since they’re designed to blend into your current workflows -- not clunkily integrate.

Faster adoption = a quicker end to the implementation process = speedier ROI.

Native Apps for Better Enterprise Solution Implementation

All in all, native Salesforce apps simply make the solution implementation process better. They’re easier to evaluate for data security purposes, faster to implement and test, and better at gaining immediate user adoption.

As with all things, you should always follow best practices when it comes to solution implementation to ensure it’s as seamless as possible. This includes:

• Defining specific needs and objectives, as well as who will be using the solution
• Surveying potential users for their input
• Gaining executive buy-in early
• Identifying potential risks of using the solution and challenging the solution provider on those issues
• Evaluating the implementation resources offered by the solution provider, and planning for resources that your organization will need to supply
• Establishing realistic expectations with your team
• Continuously monitoring adoption and maintaining communication with the vendor

By following these guidelines and evaluating native apps first, you’ll be well on your way to a better and more functional Salesforce org.

S-Docs: 100% Native Document Generation and E-Signature for Salesforce

Speaking of native apps, S-Docs is the only 100% native document generation and e-signature solution available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Create stunning documents with data pulled from anywhere in Salesforce, automate your workflows, and collect e-signatures -- 100% natively.

If you’re ready to get started with native document generation and e-signature (and implement quicker!), contact us today at sales@sdocs.com, or request a demo. We can’t wait to see what we can do to help your business succeed!

A digitally-empowered government workforce -- sounds buzzwordy, doesn’t it? What does “digitally-empowered” even mean? The opposite of “analogue-empowered?”

Well, technically -- but let’s hope nobody actually uses that phrase. A digitally-empowered government workforce is one that has taken control of the digital technologies revolutionizing the private sector and used them to adapt their operating model to the modern era.

As the pace of change increases, citizen expectations rise, and unforeseen events shake our world, leveraging the latest digital technologies is now compulsory. The public sector needs to digitalize to operate as efficiently as possible, scale in the face of disaster, and remain relevant as an essential part of functioning societies.

The consequences of avoiding digital transformation in government are formidable, and the benefits of embracing it are clear. Let’s take a look at the 5 biggest advantages of digitally-empowered government workforces.

1. Improve Citizen Experiences

At the end of the day, citizens are customers, and they expect to be treated like modern customers are treated. According to an Accenture Survey, 85% of U.S. citizens hold the government to the same or higher standards as their commercial providers. Without the right solutions, these standards are impossible for governments to meet.

Take the sheer number of channels available for interaction: social media and text for instant communication, online portals and apps for self-service, not to mention phone calls and emails.

Governments that leverage the right technology not only make all of these channels available to their citizens, they connect them all together on the backend so that the data can be used effectively. Using a CRM like Salesforce, government organizations can integrate multiple channels and systems into a singular view.

Citizens are happier when they can interact with the government on their own terms, and employees can provide better, more personalized service when it’s all connected together. What’s more, tools like Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics) can analyze the data and help agents make better decisions.

You Might Also Like: How US Government Entities Are Using Salesforce in 2020

2. Maximize Return on Public Investment

While governments and private businesses differ, a similarity can be found in the need to optimize ROI. No organization likes wasting money, and the consequences of doing so are especially strong for the public sector, where budget problems and stalled projects can actively harm constituents.

Investing in digital technologies like an integrated government CRM can dramatically improve resource management and lead to more informed spending decisions. Automated reports and dashboards can link different investments to the outcomes they produce, creating a system of accountability and a model of what to change next time.

Employing things like document automation can indirectly boost ROI through saved time and reduced errors. Automating critical government documents (and other similar workflows) can free up time for higher-value tasks and turn government workforces into more efficient machines. In turn, public value will be increased and opportunities for new innovations will become more abundant.

3. Improve Citizen Data Security

Traditionally, data security has been one of the biggest limiting factors for governments looking to move away from legacy IT systems -- cloud computing just wasn’t safe enough. But with the advent of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), government organizations are now able to leverage innovative cloud solutions without compromising data security.

You Might Also Like: Safeguarding Your Salesforce Data: Best Practices For Government Entities

Solutions like Salesforce Government Cloud provide government-specific functionality on a platform that allows government entities to be more efficient and keep their data more secure. Instead of housing data in multiple siloed systems, which increases the surface area for potential cyberattacks, everything can be consolidated and safeguarded in one place.

In addition, the Salesforce AppExchange hosts a large number of native applications that run within the secure Salesforce environment. Government organizations can extend the functionality of Salesforce without worrying about losing control of their data. S-Docs document generation and e-signature is just one of the many native Salesforce applications built with the data security needs of the public sector in mind.

You Might Also Like: 5 Security and Compliance Benefits of Salesforce Document Automation

4. Attract Better Talent

A digitally-empowered government workforce is more efficient, innovative, and aligned with the direction the business world is moving. This enables digital-first government organizations to attract and retain top talent that would otherwise be pulled by faster-moving private businesses.

While technology that empowers valuable work is lucrative to prospective employees, so is the culture that it brings with it. Governments that embrace the digital age are able to create a culture of growth and innovation from the top down. These benefits attract the kind of innovators required to keep government agencies adapting and relevant.

5. Prepare For The Future

The pace of change is speeding up. Adapting to today’s challenges will only carry an organization so far. Government entities need systems that are ready to pivot and scale at a moment’s notice when the issues of today morph into those of tomorrow.

Organizations with a digital-first approach are in the best position to weather the storms that blow their way. Cloud technology is built to update and scale quickly, allowing governments to stop lagging behind and start providing the services citizens need, making the most of their resources, and ultimately creating a better world to live in.

S-Docs: Document Generation and E-Signature for Salesforce Government Cloud

S-Docs is the only 100% native document generation and e-signature solution available for Salesforce Government Cloud. S-Docs was built by leaders in Salesforce architecture and data security, which is why it’s architected entirely on the Salesforce Lightning platform. Customer data is never sent outside of Salesforce for processing, and our solution requires zero external integrations.

As a trusted partner to government organizations around the globe, we’re here to answer any questions about your digital document needs. Reach out to sales@sdocs.com or request a demo today. Happy digitalizing!

As the insurance industry navigates the complexities of a digital-first world post-pandemic, the significance of strategic expense management and embracing efficient practices becomes paramount. Among the myriad challenges, the industry grapples with the immense reliance on paperwork, a facet not inherently conducive to remote work, efficiency, or productivity—crucial elements in today's competitive landscape.

Document automation emerges as a beacon for the insurance sector in 2024, offering enhanced cybersecurity, compliance assurance, increased efficiency, and seamless adaptability to remote work—a confluence of imperatives for sustaining competitiveness.

Where Does Document Automation Come In?

Insurance companies need to manage their expenses carefully in today's economic climate, being strategic about how they embrace the digital-first world.

Few industries are as reliant on paperwork as insurance. Thousands of documents need to be processed each day, including policy applications, policyholder agreements, claims forms, customer correspondence, and much more. Paperwork is not friendly to remote work, nor is it particularly warm toward efficiency and productivity -- all of which have become vital to get right.

Document automation software for the insurance industry is one of the few digital solutions that needs to be prioritized in 2024. It brings better cybersecurity and compliance, increased efficiency, and seamless remote work to the table -- all necessities for moving the bottom line and staying competitive this year.

Let’s dive a little deeper into why insurance companies should invest in document automation in 2024.

Ensure Compliance With Document Automation

Insurance companies are bound by regulatory policies -- lots of them. Documentation errors can result in legal action, expensive fines, and negative customer experiences. “Not in good order” (NIGO) documents can cost 3-4 times more to process than documents that are error-free.

Unfortunately, maintaining compliance with every applicable law by hand isn’t just difficult. It’s nearly impossible. That’s where document automation comes in to save the day: it takes the guesswork out of compliance concerns. How does this work?

1. Document automation solutions like S-Docs use premade templates with data tags that automatically pull information from your CRM and place it exactly where it needs to be. No copy-pasting = no human errors.
2. Document automation solutions can run business rules that catch errors before they happen. These same business rules can be used to dynamically modify your insurance documents based on predefined conditions.
3. Document automation solutions ensure that your remote workforce maintains compliance with your policies and the law. You can control who has access to create which documents, when they can be created, who they can be sent to, and much more.

You Might Also Like: 5 Security and Compliance Benefits of Salesforce Document Automation

Increase Efficiency and Meet Consumer Expectations with Document Automation

There’s a reason manual paperwork is always used as the “boring work” trope: it’s tedious, and it takes much more time than it should.

Document automation can drastically cut down the time it takes to create documents like claims and litigation forms, loss adjuster documentation, policy quotes, and notification letters -- in some cases, from days to minutes. You get increased productivity for less effort, and free up your employees for more important tasks.

As consumer expectations rise, only the most efficient companies will be able to keep up. In an industry that does business through paperwork, efficient document processes are a must.

Improve Your Cybersecurity with Document Automation

Cybersecurity was a growing concern for insurance before the pandemic, but now that employees are accessing your data systems remotely, it’s more important than ever. Data breaches are costly (as much as $14.8 million on average), and they’re much more likely to happen when sensitive data is in transit, such as from your CRM to a document stored on an employee’s local device.

Document automation applications compile your documents in the cloud, meaning your sensitive customer data doesn’t need to be handled manually. They’re also able to encrypt documents for added security.

You Might Also Like: Salesforce Data Security Best Practices for Financial Services

To really supercharge your data security efforts, look for document automation apps that are native to the platform where you store your customer data. Native apps ensure that your data is never in transit; they process everything within the system where it’s already stored.

Take S-Docs for example. It’s 100% built on the Salesforce platform, meaning that if you use Salesforce for insurance, your insurance documents are created entirely within your Salesforce instance. There’s no whitelisting 3rd party web connectors or using up API calls required. By using an app like S-Docs, you’re able to give your IT team peace of mind, and ensure that the vital process of document creation won’t compromise your business.

Improve Your Customer Communications and Gain a Competitive Advantage with Document Automation

Customer service is an important part of the insurance industry. As consumer expectations grow and fast, relevant engagement continues to become the norm, manual communications are quickly being phased out. Remaining competitive requires digital transformation.

Document automation solutions allow you to automate the generation and distribution of your customer communications, from emails to notification and renewal letters. Customer actions on your website or insurance portal can trigger different forms to be sent out at the appropriate time. And because insurance document templates pull data from your CRM, they’ll always be customized and tailored to each individual.

You Might Also Like: How To Design a Professional Quote in Salesforce

Increase Your Bottom Line With Document Automation

Document automation can help increase your bottom line in a few ways. For one, the immense amount of time saved by automating insurance documents increases productivity in more valuable areas.

Additionally, document automation can help move sales quicker. Automated insurance policy quotes, contracts, and bills help salespeople provide relevant information to their customers quicker and keep deals moving. Most insurance document automation solutions allow reps to track metrics for their documents like number of opens, giving them the opportunity to make intelligent decisions about next steps in the sales process.

Finally, many document automation applications offer proprietary e-signature applications, or easily integrate with third-party providers. E-signatures remove the bottlenecks associated with closing deals, allowing anyone to sign an agreement no matter where they are.

Empower Remote Work With Document Automation

Remote and hybrid work will likely be with us for some time to come. Equipping your employees with the best tools to get their jobs done from home is essential to business continuity. For the insurance industry, this means enabling the remote workforce to create and distribute documents in a safe and secure way. Outside of tedious, complex workarounds, document automation solutions are the way to go.

2024 & Beyond

Insurance companies should be focusing on developing strategies to enable productivity, collaboration, and innovation now so that they can emerge on top. Those who prioritize digitally transforming the right way will ultimately be the ones to succeed.

S-Docs: Document Automation For The Insurance Industry

S-Docs is the only 100% native document automation and e-signature solution for Salesforce. S-Docs allows you to create, edit, and automate data-driven insurance document templates in just a few minutes.

Since it’s native to the Salesforce platform, your data stays within your org. If you trust Salesforce, you can trust S-Docs, too. Hundreds of leading insurance organizations have partnered with S-Docs for their Salesforce document automation needs because of the increased speed and security that our solutions bring to the table.

If you’re ready to experience the native difference with S-Docs, reach out! Request a demo today or contact sales@sdocs.com. Happy automating!

At the risk of using the most cliché word of the year, we’ll say it: 2020 was unprecedented. Change was on everyone’s docket on January 1st, but nobody foresaw the events that would upend the world in a matter of months.

For S-Docs, the pandemic meant office shutdowns, video calls, and lots of virtual team lunches. Yet despite the challenges of the year, 2020 saw us helping more customers streamline their Salesforce document and e-signature workflows than ever before. The year was packed with new product innovations, UI upgrades, record-breaking growth, and giving back to the community.

As the year draws to a close, we’re reflecting on S-Docs’s leading highlights for 2020. Let’s see how our product’s strength and our team’s resilience enabled us to support our customers through adversity and continue giving back to the amazing Trailblazer community surrounding us.

A Record-Breaking Year (In More Ways Than One)

Above all else, S-Docs is committed to trust, transparency, and first-rate security. Although the pandemic has turned the idea of long-term planning upside down, S-Docs was able to drive growth and support our customers this year through our unwavering commitment to our values. We are thrilled to report that we were able to shatter growth records every quarter, meaning that 2020 is our most successful year to date. This is a testament to our customers’ trust in the security, speed, and ease of use of our 100% native solutions.

As the pandemic has shown, broken records aren’t always a good thing. This year has also seen record high numbers of unemployment, virus cases, and businesses struggling to convert to remote work. That’s why S-Docs has also taken 2020 to ensure that our resources are helping wherever they can.

For one, our document generation and e-signature solutions are built to facilitate working from anywhere. These vital functions have helped our customers maintain “business as usual” throughout the turbulent year. Additionally, our many partners in the healthcare industry have made use of S-Docs for safe contactless document processing.

S-Docs is also committed to the health and safety of every employee. That’s why we implemented a wellness program that ensures the team is equipped with the necessary resources to stay active and maintain optimum health while working from home.

Finally, we’ve also pledged to match employee donations to nonprofit organizations throughout the world in an effort to give back to the community, both during this trying year and in years to come.

Welcoming New Customers and Partners

From continuous product improvement to giving back through the Pledge 1% program, none of our successes in 2020 would have been possible without our incredible customers. We had the opportunity to partner with new organizations in industries across the board this year, and saw massive developments in the government, healthcare, and financial service industries. Our native Salesforce architecture makes us a trusted solution for businesses that value data security highly, since S-Docs never sends data outside of the Salesforce cloud.

As we onboarded new customers, we also saw many existing S-Docs users expand their accounts as the ROI that document automation and e-signature achieved spoke for itself. S-Docs is able to create and e-sign any type of business document you can think of, meaning that multiple departments across an organization can benefit from its abilities.

In addition, we brought on several new partners this year, allowing us to expand our resources and help even more businesses with their Salesforce document and e-signature needs.

Introducing New Product Innovations

As we continue to grow, our products continue to get better and better. Our product teams were hard at work this year on optimizations, improvements, and new functionality aimed at satisfying our customers’ current needs and adapting to their unmet and emerging challenges.

You can read a full list of changes in our quarterly release notes, but here are a few of our favorite updates:

• Revamped User Interface: We dove into the UI of our template editor and gave it a fresh coat of paint, making it easier to use while preserving the workflows that customers are used to. Take a look at more details in this blog post!
• Drag & Drop: You can now upload any PDF to the S-Docs template editor and drag & drop merge fields and signature tags onto the document. This adds even more flexibility to the template-building experience.
• Heightened Security: Security is our top priority at S-Docs. We put our application through rigorous testing to ensure it’s always employing first-rate data security standards on top of its secure native architecture. This has resulted in improved app functionality and continues to differentiate S-Docs as the most secure solution for document generation & e-signature for Salesforce.

These are just a few of the exciting updates from 2020, and we’re not losing steam now. There’s plenty more to come in 2021, including further UI enhancements and lots of great new features, so stay tuned!

Growing Our Team & Getting Involved In The Community

Ensuring the success of our customers is only possible with a strong team of passionate individuals who champion our values. That’s why we expanded nearly every department around the globe with talented individuals committed to perfecting our product offerings and continually improving the customer experience.

Although it wasn’t the year for in-person events, we still found ways to get involved in the Salesforce Trailblazer community. We started the year by collecting the expert advice of Salesforce MVPs and publishing their tips for the community on Salesforce best practices, productivity, and career growth. We also hosted several lunch & learns aimed at educating businesses on how to navigate remote work and get connected to the right solutions to help with business continuity.

As a proud member of the Pledge 1% program, we also sought to help and give back to the community wherever we could. Along with matching employee donations to nonprofit organizations, S-Docs organized a toy drive this holiday season to help families in need. We look forward to continuously doing our part as we move into the new year.

Get In Contact In 2021!

After a year like 2020, one thing’s become clear: no matter what 2021 has in store for us, we’re ready to meet those challenges head on and continue helping businesses digitalize, automate, and e-sign their Salesforce documents faster & more securely. Don’t want to miss out on the exciting innovations to come? Reach out to us! You can always request a demo or contact sales@sdocs.com.

For product updates, news, and leading developments in the document automation and e-signature worlds, you can also follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn. We’ll see you in 2021!

How much did the device you’re using to read these words cost? Seems like a simple question -- just dig up the receipt and you have your answer.

The thing is, the price you paid for the desktop, laptop, or mobile device that’s displaying this article probably isn’t equal to what it actually costs in the long run.

Sure, you might’ve taken home your laptop for $1000. But what about the time you spent setting it up, transferring files, and maybe even learning a new system? What if you run out of storage space and need an external hard drive? What happens when it requires repair after a hardware malfunction?

All of these are examples of additional costs taken on after you purchased your device, which can be factored into its total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO is an important consideration when making any type of business asset investment, from laptops to AppExchange solutions.

What is Total Cost of Ownership?

Total cost of ownership, sometimes called total lifecycle cost, is the total cost incurred during the useful life of an asset. The most obvious of these costs is purchase price -- the hard number listed on your invoice. But depending on the product or service that you’re evaluating, the purchase price is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath are the hidden costs that aren’t always tangible from the get-go, but ultimately reveal themselves as you begin using the product.

Overall, the total cost of ownership covers short and long term costs of using a particular product. If you can find a product with a lower total cost of ownership, you’ll get more value and higher ROI out of that product in the long-run.

You Might Also Like: How Native Salesforce Apps Drive Innovation

How Do Native Salesforce Apps Reduce Total Cost of Ownership?

Total cost of ownership is especially important when it comes to evaluating different Salesforce AppExchange apps. Salesforce is a complex and incredibly powerful tool. The solutions you choose to extend and enhance its functionality should increase the ROI you already get from it -- in other words, you don’t want to commit to an app that ends up being more of a burden than a solution.

Luckily, native Salesforce apps like S-Docs are in the best position to minimize your total cost of ownership since they’re built directly on the Salesforce platform. Because of this, most traditional TCO considerations are shared with Salesforce and don’t apply to native apps like they would to off-platform solutions.

Let’s examine why native apps are the smart choice when it comes to maximizing value and minimizing the hidden costs underneath the iceberg.

Pre-Acquisition Costs

Total cost of ownership starts accumulating before you even sign an agreement. Time spent on research, security analysis, and trials must all be factored into the total cost of ownership for any solution. For larger enterprises, this process can take months and consume thousands of valuable hours.

When a business evaluates a native app, however, things can be expedited significantly. Native apps are architected on the Salesforce Lightning platform, meaning that they’re built on a platform that anyone using Salesforce has already approved. They automatically inherit Salesforce’s first-class data security standards.

There’s no need to pour months of time into evaluating whether or not a native app will keep your company’s data safe -- you can be sure from the beginning that your data will remain within the Salesforce cloud. However, be on the lookout for apps that claim to be native because their user interface lives in Salesforce -- oftentimes, they still send data outside of Salesforce on the backend for processing. Ensure you have the facts on what being native really means.

Setup and Deployment

The implementation process for native Salesforce applications is typically much quicker and easier than that for off-platform solutions, saving time for admins and avoiding disrupting production.

Since native solutions are really just an extension of your existing Salesforce setup, they blend more seamlessly with your environment -- no matter how many custom configurations you have. Setting them up is easier because they’re built using the tools that you’re already familiar with, as well as the same nomenclature and styling as Salesforce.

You Might Also Like: 4 Ways Native Salesforce Apps Are Transforming The Healthcare Industry

Training and User Adoption

Training and user adoption are important factors to consider when calculating your app’s total cost of ownership. How long will it take to skill up your users on the new application? Once they’ve been trained, will the application fit into their workflows, or will adoption be a constant struggle?

Like we said before, native apps are built to be an extension of your org, not a clunky integration. There’s no foreign system or syntax to learn. Users that already understand Salesforce will have a much easier time learning and using a native application over a non-native one.

Maintenance

Any business solution will require maintenance from time to time, whether due to minor issues or adapting to application upgrades. This can affect the total cost of ownership in the long run if time spent maintaining an app is exceeding the ROI gained from it.

Native apps are engineered by Salesforce experts who know how to optimize their solution to work with your favorite CRM. In other words, when you invest in a native app, you’re receiving a solution that’s tailored to the platform you use to carry out fundamental business activities. As a result, maintenance is required less frequently, and can often be carried out in-house. And if you ever get stuck, native apps provide support teams that are trained to work with Salesforce.

This also means that your native app will adapt as Salesforce does, and stay on top of its updates and latest features.

Licensing

By now, you know that native Salesforce apps are built on the Salesforce platform, run on Salesforce servers, and don’t work without Salesforce. So how does this relate to licensing costs?

Since native app providers aren’t paying for their own infrastructure to host and maintain their applications, they’re able to pass those savings along to their customers. You can be confident that you aren’t paying twice for infrastructure when you purchase a native app.

Data Security

When you hire a new employee and give them access to your company data, you’re taking on some level of risk. That’s why you use permission sets and sharing rules to control what different users can see and interact with.

Implementing a new application into your Salesforce org is no different. You’re bringing on a system that interacts with your data, meaning you’re taking on similar data security risks. Depending on your industry, the cost of a data breach could skyrocket your total cost of ownership and nullify any ROI achieved.

Native Salesforce applications process your data entirely on Salesforce servers. Your data is never required to leave your org, and native app providers aren’t able to see it. Your existing Salesforce security setup applies even when your data is being processed by a native app. And since data is never in transit between clouds, the surface area for breaches is greatly diminished.

You Might Also Like: How to Evaluate The Security of AppExchange Apps

Downtime

When you invest in a new business solution, you expect it to be up and running when you need it. Downtime can cause anything from a day of unnecessary manual work to thousands of dollars in lost productivity. And when you rely on applications hosted on other clouds, downtime can be unpredictable.

Understanding downtime for native Salesforce apps is much simpler: if Salesforce is up and running, so is your native app. And because Salesforce publishes their system performance and security status in real time, you’ll never be left guessing.

Scalability

Any good business solution will add value to your company and help you grow and meet your goals. But if your solutions can’t scale with your business, they may hinder you in the long run and increase the total cost of ownership.

As your Salesforce system grows and increases in complexity, native apps are ready to scale alongside your business. They’re made for the Salesforce platform and match Salesforce’s platform elasticity. Adding thousands of additional users won’t hamper any existing workflow -- the Salesforce Lightning platform infrastructure can handle it all.

In addition, native apps don’t count against your Salesforce org’s daily API limits, meaning that increased utilization of your native app won’t affect other processes in your org, or require purchasing additional API calls. By contrast, non-native applications may require multiple calls per invocation.

You Might Also Like: E-Signature For Salesforce: 3 Reasons Native Apps Are Better

Choose Native Salesforce Apps First

Native Salesforce applications are not a cure-all for every business challenge, but when you do find a fit, you’re likely to achieve a vastly higher ROI because your total cost of ownership will be lowered in so many areas. Native apps are generally faster, more scalable, and much more secure than their alternatives. In short, they’re built to be partners in growth and innovation with the businesses that use them.

Get Started with 100% Native Document Generation & E-Signature Today

S-Docs is the only 100% native document generation and e-signature solution available on the Salesforce AppExchange. S-Docs allows you to generate and e-sign sophisticated documents in seconds, with data merged in from anywhere in Salesforce. Since it’s built and hosted on the Salesforce Lightning platform, that data is processed entirely within Salesforce -- no whitelisting external IPs, approving third-party web connectors, or API calls involved.

When it comes to total cost of ownership, S-Docs is here to help you skyrocket your ROI and reduce lifetime expenses. In just a few minutes, you can download S-Docs from the AppExchange and build your first template. And if you’re itching to get started immediately, we’ve got you covered -- you can download premade templates from our extensive library and begin generating documents right away. S-Docs doesn’t charge fees per document or e-signature request, reducing your TCO even more and maximizing your lifetime value.

To find out more about what S-Docs can do for your business, get in touch with us! Our product experts would love to hear from you. Request a demo today or contact sales@sdocs.com. 

A good document automation strategy is crucial for scalable business operations. But you can't automate everything - so what documents should you really be focusing on? Great candidates for automation meet four key criteria. These documents:

• Are created frequently on a regular schedule
• Take lots of time to put together manually
• Require little to medium amounts of customization
• Use data housed in a single source of truth (like Salesforce)

Now it’s time to look at three key documents that you can start automating today to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and make your business processes more secure:

1. Invoices
2. Customer Correspondence
3. Account & Opportunity Summaries

Click here if you missed part one - and learn about 3 more key business documents to automate in Salesforce today.

Invoices

Once proposals are sent, quotes approved, and contracts signed, invoices ensure that you get rewarded for your efforts. All you have to do is put together a list of prices and payment terms, then send out the document and wait for the money to roll in...right?

If you’ve already read part 1 of this series, you’re probably picking up a pattern here -- creating these common documents is never as simple as it sounds, and invoices are no exception. Manually created invoices are prone to errors and tedious to get right (who would’ve guessed?), especially if there are multiple different ones to keep track of. It’s also difficult to maintain the same branding and style across multiple invoices, which can make you look unprofessional. Furthermore, invoices themselves aren’t the only problem -- when you leave payment reminders up to memory, you open the door to missed payments and much more work for your team.

Luckily, automation can save the day when it comes to invoices, too. Automating your invoice process is a step towards faster revenue attainment and a much smoother prospect-customer transition. When you generate your invoices with the click of a button or a field change, you ensure that the data is correct and the customer receives it as soon as it’s necessary, upping the chances of fast payment.

You May Also Like: 5 Security and Compliance Benefits of Salesforce Document Automation

If your new customers aren’t exactly jumping at the opportunity to respond to your invoices, document automation solutions have you covered there, too. You can configure payment reminders to be automatically sent at regular intervals or when deadlines approach, freeing up valuable time for sales and accounting. If you need to set up recurring invoices, that’s no problem, either.

With automated invoices, you’ll get paid faster, make your customers happier, and be confident that you are always sending polished, error-free documents. No matter where your team is, invoice automation ensures you’re running “business as usual” no matter how unusual things may get. Check out the S-Docs template library for pre-built invoices and other finance templates to start using today.

Customer Correspondence

Regular communication with your customers lets them know that they are valued by your organization, which increases their chances of renewing their account or recommending your products or services to others. Customer correspondence is key to maintaining positive customer relationships and a good reputation in your industry.

Creating personalized assets to send to customers is incredibly important, but it’s also extremely time consuming -- and when you have thousands of customers to communicate with, it quickly becomes impossible to handle manually.

Automating your customer correspondence documents -- whether it’s account welcome letters, Thank-Yous, invitations, vouchers, or anything else -- can be a lifesaver for small and large teams alike. The word “automation” might not immediately make you think “personalized,” but don’t let it fool you -- using templates that pull data from Salesforce and leverage the power of conditional logic, document automation solutions can create complex, highly personalized documents that make your customers feel valued.

You May Also Like: How to Design a Beautiful Document

We’re not the only ones who think you should be automating customer correspondence. Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, sends and receives millions of types of customer correspondence on a daily basis -- think coupons, vouchers, giveaways, discounts, and more. When their initial automation system relied too much on manual efforts, they turned to S-Docs to fully automate the creation and execution of all customer communication. With the help of S-Docs, they’re now able to generate, print, and fulfill customer letters using a vastly improved workflow. Along with saved time and energy, S-Docs enables Nestle to maintain their brand promise and keep millions of customers happy.

Download these customer correspondence templates from our library to get started and spark your own automation ideas.

Account & Opportunity Summaries

Account and opportunity summary documents provide valuable information about the state of new business, current customers, and opportunities for expansion. Sales managers and executives often need the insights that these documents provide to make operational decisions and ensure goals are being met.

The problem with account and opportunity summaries is that getting them right requires digging up lots of data and then making it easy to understand. In an ideal world, all of the necessary information would reside on individual account or opportunity records, but this isn’t usually the case. Data is often scattered across objects, meaning that tracking it down can waste valuable time. And once you have it, it needs to be cleanly formatted, which can eat up just as much time.

Here’s the solution: build your account and opportunity summary documents with a document automation app, and never worry about getting them right again. Let’s say a sales manager requests an opportunity summary once opportunities reach a certain stage -- this is no problem with a document automation solution. Once a few pre-built templates are set up and automated, everything is done in the background.

You Might Also Like: 3 Tricks to Impressing Your Team and Consistently Over-Delivering

What’s more, document automation solutions that are built specifically for Salesforce don’t limit you to gathering data from one record, or even related records. Using a native solution like S-Docs, you can build powerful documents that query information across your entire Salesforce org and merge in things like Dashboards charts to provide clean, actionable insights in seconds.

You can also easily aggregate data to create sophisticated pipeline reports that go far beyond out-of-box Salesforce functionality. As long as the information is in Salesforce, it can be pulled together and customized to fit your business needs. Experience the power of document automation for reporting with these free templates.

Optimize Efficiency with Document Automation

The business landscape has been changing for quite some time, and if you’re aiming to gain an edge over the competition, slow and manual workflows just don’t cut it anymore.

The benefits of automating your documents are clear: productivity spikes, errors take a nosedive, and both employees and customers are happier as a result. Your team will be afforded the time to focus on higher-value work, which will translate to innumerable advantages down the road.

Document automation may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think “digital transformation,” but it’s key to modernizing traditional business processes. The sooner it’s implemented, the sooner you’ll be set up for long-term business success, no matter what the world throws at you.

Get Started Today

S-Docs is the only 100% native document automation and e-signature solution available for the Salesforce platform. For over ten years, S-Docs has been helping businesses around the world automate their mission-critical documents and save thousands of hours of productivity.

It’s built entirely on the Salesforce platform -- that means no API calls, no network traffic between clouds, and no transporting your data anywhere. When you automate your documents with S-Docs, everything is 100% generated, delivered, and stored on Salesforce servers. Because of this, S-Docs is faster, much more secure, and easier to use than non-native alternatives.

Being native also means that S-Docs is powerful -- generate complex documents with data merged in from anywhere in Salesforce, multiple SOQL queries, conditional logic, nested templates, and much, much more.

Thousands of businesses rely on S-Docs every day to accomplish the tedious work in the background while they focus on what matters most. If you’re ready to join leading businesses around the world in automating and e-signing documents with S-Docs, request a demo today, or email us at sales@sdocs.com.

Document automation may sound simple, but implementing it into your Salesforce can skyrocket organizational efficiency, eliminate inaccuracies, and a whole lot more. Document generators take a tedious but vital business function out of the hands of manual users, allowing them to focus on value-adding work instead.

You Might Also Like: Digital Solutions for a Changing World

But which documents should you really be automating to get the most bang for your buck? Our team of experts put together this guide to highlight the most important docs to automate today to reduce errors and optimize productivity. As a 100% native document generation and e-signature solution for Salesforce, S-Docs has over 10 years of experience helping businesses securely automate and e-sign their documents.

Check out part 2 for even more documents that you could automate today!

Key Business Documents You Should Be Automating

While it would be nice to automate every document you’ll ever have to work with, that’s not always feasible or advisable. If you’re just getting started with document automation or looking for tips to improve your setup, start by identifying documents you would benefit most from automating. Great candidates for document automation:

• Are created frequently on a regular schedule
• Take lots of time to put together manually
• Require little to medium amounts of customization
• Use data housed in a single source of truth (like Salesforce)

Documents that meet all of these requirements provide the highest ROI when they’re automated because they’re usually mission-critical, easier to set up, and save the most time for your team in the long run. This article looks at 3 common business documents in this group that you should start automating today.

1. Business Proposals
2. Quotes
3. Contracts

Be sure to check out part 2 as well, where we go over the final 3 mission-critical documents that you can start automating right away!

Business Proposals

When it comes to winning new business, proposals are essential documents for any sales team. Organized and well-designed proposals will leave your prospect with a clear sense of your product or service’s benefits, as well as what you bring to the table over the competition.

Here’s the problem: depending on the project, proposals can turn into lengthy documents that require a lot of customization. Even if you have a few templates built out already, copying and pasting information over from a spreadsheet or CRM like Salesforce can be error-prone and time-consuming. No prospect has ever been wowed by a lagging, error-filled proposal process.

So what’s the secret to avoiding or eliminating these problems? The answer: automate your business proposals. When you use a document automation solution like S-Docs, you can create elegant business proposal templates that dynamically pull in all of the necessary information directly from Salesforce. This slashes the time it takes to compile these lengthy, information-rich documents from hours down to seconds. The result is increased efficiency, reduced errors, and improved accuracy.

Document automation solutions also let you fine-tune the level of automation that works for your business requirements. Complex proposals can require a rep to review and make edits before being sent, while shorter and more straightforward ones can be configured to generate and send based on different events, like when an Opportunity enters the Proposal/Price Quote stage in Salesforce. However they’re automated, time is saved across the board and customers are happier -- according to a report by Qvidian, over 50% of organizations improved their win rate by automating proposals.

Document automation software can also help with great proposal design and brand consistency. By utilizing the elements of document design, you can create stunning proposals that persuade and close. In fact, we made a whole guide on creating game-changing proposals; check it out here!

Quotes

While business proposals provide an overarching view into a solution, quotes are their highly specific cousins. Quotes are usually one or two pages generated in response to interest in specific products or services. They can include details like estimated price, timeline, and general terms and conditions, and are integral to any sales team.

The problem with quotes is that they’re usually filled with information that’s already been entered into Salesforce, meaning that creating them manually requires a lot of repeated work. Fast-paced sales teams don’t always have time to manually compile quotes throughout the day, especially since quotes are needed so frequently. If they are being created in a hurry, incorrect info might be sent to prospects, hurting your chances of winning new business.

Automating your sales quote process has the potential to save hundreds of hours of productivity, bring down errors and significantly increase your win rate. Since quotes require highly specific information and are sent at clearly-defined business stages, setting up templates and implementing automation will be lightning fast. Document automation solutions make it easy to automatically merge customized lists of products into your quotes, such as Opportunity Line Items in Salesforce, and then email them based on your own business rules.

You Might Also Like: How to Design a Professional Quote in Salesforce

Quote automation is an essential step towards more productive sales teams and a cohesive digital strategy. Don’t just take our word for it: when multinational electronics company Panasonic realized that quote creation was draining valuable time from both their sales and technical teams, they turned to S-Docs to help optimize the process. With the help of S-Docs native Salesforce document automation, Panasonic was able to automate and significantly speed up their quote process, saving countless hours of productivity. Their sales team could focus more on selling, and their technical team could focus on strategic projects rather than updating templates. Panasonic now relies on S-Docs every day for quotes, correspondence letters, and invoices.

Automating sales quotes can save your team time and ensure that you’re prepared for anything coming your way, both during times of crisis and in the recovery that follows. Check out our template library for free quote templates that you can download and start using today.

Contracts

Contracts are ubiquitous in the business world. They lay out the terms of sales agreements, partner relationships, and a whole host of other things. They’re one of the most common documents around, and also one of the most valuable, since they protect the interests of both your company and your customers.

Although thousands of types of contracts exist, they’re all subject to one universal truth: nobody likes waiting for them. And yet, lagging contract processes seem to be the rule instead of the exception. The drafting and approval process can take months, leaving lots of time unnecessarily wasted. In addition, legacy contract workflows may impose security risks with widespread remote work. As vital as they are, contracts can be extremely inefficient and hard to manually control.

For this reason, we recommend automating your contract creation process to increase speed and improve security and compliance. Like the documents we mentioned previously, automated contracts allow you to avoid the copy-paste black hole that sucks time and creates errors, since all data will be automatically merged in from Salesforce. Standard contracts can be pre-approved and set to be automatically emailed to contacts when a field is updated, while others can prompt legal to review and make edits first.

If you have multiple contracts that contain identical sections (like a standard Terms and Conditions clause), document automation solutions like S-Docs can help keep things organized and up-to-date. It’s easy to maintain and update a library of individual clause templates that you can reference in your main contracts. When you edit a clause template, any contracts that contain that clause will be updated.

Finally, automating your contracts will significantly increase security and compliance, reducing the risk of lengthy revisions and even voided deals. For one, automated contracts leave less room for errors that might otherwise threaten a contract’s validity. They also make compliance much easier. For example, if your customers are located in multiple different countries, you can configure your contracts to automatically include or exclude certain clauses based on the country or state in which your customer resides, maintaining compliance with local laws.

You Might Also Like: 5 Security and Compliance Benefits of Salesforce Document Automation

Automated contracts boost internal security too, since you can control who has access to each document and what can be edited. Since automated contracts are generated using pre-approved templates and pull data from your source of truth, you can also be confident in their accuracy.

Salesforce native solutions like S-Docs take this security to a whole new level. Since they’re built on the Salesforce platform, native solutions never require your data to leave Salesforce for processing -- when you generate a document with S-Docs, your data remains on Salesforce servers and never changes hands. S-Docs is especially useful for documents like contracts that often include sensitive data that isn’t meant to be shared. While IT departments might be wary about routinely sending data to third-party servers for processing, they can be confident in using a document automation solution that’s integrated into the platform that they already trust.

Summing It Up

Setting up Salesforce document automation for some of your most common documents will save your team time, move the productivity needle through the roof, and even make your workflows more secure. These three documents are a great starting point, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to streamlining your business processes with automation. Check out part 2 next, where we go over 3 more documents that are perfect for automation.

Get Started with S-Docs Today

S-Docs is a document automation solution purpose-built for Salesforce users. Since it’s native to the Lightning Platform, it’s incredibly easy to download and start using right away. It mirrors the look and feel of Salesforce, acting as a seamless extension of your org. And with S-Docs, your data never leaves the platform, making it an incredibly secure solution to any document automation requirement.

Get started today with 2 free templates. For a customized demo that will illustrate how S-Docs can meet your unique business needs, request a demo today or contact our sales team at sales@sdocs.com. Happy automating!

When an organization first introduces document automation to their Salesforce stack, some immediate benefits are crystal clear. Efficiency and productivity skyrocket as your team is able to focus on high-value tasks that no longer vie for time against tedious document creation workflows.

A good document automation strategy won’t just move the needle on productivity, though. You’ll see a variety of organizational facets strengthened when you remove the manual component from your invoices, proposals, contracts, and other mission-critical documents. Key among these surprising benefits is increased security and compliance. Since 88% of IT professionals agree that having to meet compliance standards can hinder cloud adoption, these benefits are vital as more enterprises move to the cloud.

So how does Salesforce document automation make a positive impact on your organization’s data security? To find out, let’s take a look at what document automation really means.

What Is Document Automation?

Document automation is the process by which document templates are automatically formatted and populated with data based on predefined rules. Using document generation solutions like S-Docs, these rules can be based on any platform-triggering event in Salesforce, such as a record update. The data used to create documents can come from anywhere in Salesforce.

Document automation can encompass everything from complete automation, such as invoices being generated and emailed based on an Account’s renewal date, to partial automation, such as certain templates being preselected for a user based on their assigned permissions.

You may not realize it, but we’ve just described two of the most important security benefits provided by document automation: reproducibility and least-privilege isolation. Document automation allows for identical and repeatable results, and ensures users (or systems) can only generate and send the documents that they absolutely need to.

This article will examine these security benefits and more of implementing a Salesforce document automation solution.

You Might Also Like: Upgrading Your Document Generation System? Here's What You Need To Know

5 Security And Compliance Benefits of Document Automation

As more and more security-conscious industries move to the cloud, their documents move too. Companies in the healthcare, government, and financial services industries need to be sure that their sensitive information isn’t at risk when it comes to document creation. Luckily, document automation for Salesforce offers several key cybersecurity benefits.

1. Reproducibility

One of the most important benefits of document automation is that it is based on clearly defined rules. No matter what your criteria is, you’ll know exactly which conditions documents can be generated under, every time.

This is important for several reasons. For one, repeatable processes are easier to manage and secure. When you take other aspects of your org’s security into consideration, it’s much easier to factor in automated processes than spontaneous user input. Additionally, it’s easier to track issues when your processes are reproducible. Should something go wrong, IT will have a much easier time pinpointing the source and tweaking the process when that process is automated.

2. The Principle of Least Privilege

The principle of least privilege is a security concept stating that users should receive the minimum system access necessary to perform their job. This limits the surface area for data breaches should a user make a mistake or abuse their privileges. Document automation applies this concept to an organization’s documentation requirements.

Document automation allows you to set the specific conditions under which documents can be created, including conditions that dictate which users have access to generate and email which documents. Depending on your organization’s security policies, you can make these as open or restrictive as necessary. User compliance can become a nonissue when documents containing sensitive information are only created under clearly-defined circumstances.

3. Minimized Human Error

While your team is your most valuable resource, the fact of the matter is that humans make mistakes. According to a CybSafe analysis, human error was the cause of 90% of data breaches in 2019. For organizations that need to generate documents with confidential information, there’s simply no room for human error.

Luckily, automated processes are about as airtight as they come. Using the right business rules, document automation can save you from the following situations and more:

• Sending sensitive information to the wrong contact
• Accidentally emailing an internal document to an external contact
• Providing an incorrect quote or invoice to a client
• Including the wrong clause in a contract

Document automation solutions like S-Docs don’t just pull all of the relevant data directly from Salesforce -- they also include or exclude certain fields, lists, and even entire document pages based on the state of the record(s) that they’re grabbing data from. The risk of human-caused data leaks drops to near zero with Salesforce document automation.

4. Secure Document Storage

Document automation solutions allow for a seamless transition from database to storage solution. Once your document is automatically created, it can be automatically filed away in the storage repository of your choice without any user input required. This eliminates the need for an individual to download a document for transfer between different systems, which would create more surface area for document misplacement or leakage.

This also enables you to fine-tune which documents can be transferred between systems, and which must stay within Salesforce.

5. Standardized Sensitive Documents

Whether they contain sensitive information or need to be formatted according to organizational policies, certain documents aren’t open to being changed. From legal contracts to government forms, every organization must create certain documents that need to come out the same way, every time.

Since document automation solutions rely on pre-made document templates, there’s no need to worry about messed-up formatting or leaving out the non-compete clause. Your documents will be standardized from the get-go, and compliance with your document policies will hit 100% as all documents are automatically created in accordance with your guidelines.

The Native Advantage

These five security and compliance benefits of document automation are certain to boost your organization’s data security, increase document policy compliance, and put IT teams at ease when it comes to cloud adoption.

Now take it a step further by choosing 100% native document automation apps like S-Docs. Native Salesforce apps are built directly on the Salesforce platform, which means they’re executed and delivered 100% within the Salesforce cloud.

While non-native document automation solutions offer many of the security benefits listed above, the fact remains that they must transfer your data outside of Salesforce for processing before creating documents and sending them back to your org. When your data changes hands, it becomes much more vulnerable.

When you automate your document workflows with S-Docs, your data never leaves Salesforce. Everything is securely processed within your org with zero reliance on external servers. If you already trust Salesforce, you can be confident that your data is secure when you use native apps. To top it all off, native apps work faster since they don’t need to make API calls between clouds, and they’re easier to use since they mirror the look and feel of Salesforce.

You Might Also Like: How Native Salesforce Apps Drive Innovation

Get Started With S-Docs Today

Ready to start increasing your organization’s efficiency and security with native document automation? Our team of experts would love to hear from you! For a customized demo that will show you all S-Docs has to offer, request a demo or shoot us an email at sales@sdocs.com. 

Here at S-Docs, we believe in continuous product innovation to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. Throughout the course of 2020 our team has been hard at work researching, designing, and developing an all-new user interface (UI) for our in-browser template editor, which allows users to build sophisticated document templates directly within Salesforce.

After months of development based on customer feedback and input from UI/UX experts, we’re ready to show off our sleek new look that preserves the workflows you’re accustomed to while streamlining and refining your experience. Here’s a view into the new template editor user interface, including the reasoning behind the update and how it’ll help you be more efficient at building documents in Salesforce. Welcome to S-Docs’s UI refresh.

Our Main Goals

Robust feature functionality is imperative to our customers’ success -- you can check out our release notes for quarterly updates -- but great product design is just as important. When we set out to overhaul the S-Docs template editor experience, we had a few goals in mind:

• Ease of Use: The template editor is intuitive and easy to navigate for all users, whether they’ve been using S-Docs for five years or five minutes
• Efficiency: Users can easily find answers to their questions and get connected to new features to help them work smarter
• Modernization: The power of S-Docs 100% native document generation and e-signature solutions is reflected in its modern look and feel

Let’s take a look at the new template editor UI in the context of these goals, and see how each one will contribute to the continued success of our customers today and in the future.

Ease of Use

S-Docs is a 100% native Salesforce application, meaning that it’s built directly on the Salesforce platform. Among the many advantages that come with being native to Salesforce, S-Docs is easier to use than off-platform counterparts since it uses the Salesforce styling and nomenclature that users are already familiar with. The UI refresh expands upon this existing ease of use and takes it to a whole new level.

Mirrors Salesforce Lightning

The template editor now more closely mirrors the look and feel of Salesforce Lightning, meaning the transition from working in apps like Sales Cloud to S-Docs is virtually seamless.

But don’t worry! If you’re still using Salesforce Classic, you’ll receive all of the same benefits from the UI refresh in a style that mirrors the look and feel of Classic.

Responsive Design

The template editor didn’t just get a new coat of paint -- it got smarter, too. Every aspect of the editor is now responsive, from buttons to checkboxes to unit of measurement settings. This helps give users a clear idea of what can and can’t be done when certain settings are enabled or certain tabs are selected.

Easy Navigation

We cleaned up and standardized the template editor from top to bottom, meaning that each tab is easy to navigate and provides the same user experience. This simple but powerful consistency means that new users will learn much faster, and current users will be much more efficient.

Our many ease-of-use upgrades make the S-Docs template editor much more accessible to users of all experience levels. This means that now anyone can start building templates faster and achieve a much quicker time to value than before.

Efficiency

On top of making the S-Docs template editor easier to use, our UI refresh helps users learn about its many different features and find new functionality to further enhance their Salesforce document workflows.

We added numerous helpful tooltips throughout the editor that explain functionality, provide example syntax, and give users tips on best practices that they can employ to fully optimize their use of the template editor.

In addition to tooltips, we also introduced new “Learn More” buttons at varying spots around the editor. These buttons route users to product documentation on our website that provides even more tips and tricks on leveraging the template editor to supercharge their Salesforce documents. They’re also a great way to learn about new features that can help you use S-Docs to be even more successful. Our goal is to make sure our customers are using the features best-suited for their unique business needs.

Modernization

S-Docs helps you create sophisticated, beautiful documents directly within Salesforce, so it only makes sense that the experience of building them should be beautiful, too. That’s why our UI refresh aimed to modernize the look and feel of the S-Docs template editor. The new sleek, clean look aligns with our users’ expectations and more accurately reflects the power of our solutions -- as a 100% native, FedRAMP-compliant Salesforce app, we thought that our superior security and speed deserved a smooth, elegant finish.

Keeping pace with the evolving standards of design is crucial to delivering a product experience that users can intuitively learn, but it also lays the foundation for strong updates in the future. The new refined, consistent look of the template editor provides the groundwork for continuous innovation by our product teams. New features will be added in a way that feels logical to our customers so that they can hit the ground running with every update released.

See For Yourself

Our new template editor user interface significantly streamlines your workflows while maintaining the same S-Docs experience that end-users and admins love. We believe that this update will be a valuable addition to your current processes and a significant component to your continued business success.

Look out for our December 2020 release notes for instructions on how to get access to the upgraded UI, as well as details on the many other new features and enhancements we’ve been developing to continue supercharging your digital document workflows.

If you’re still thinking about giving S-Docs a try for the first time, we’d love to hear from you! Request a demo today or contact sales@sdocs.com.