16 posts tagged with “template maintenance”
Every Salesforce docgen tool has a drag-and-drop builder now. Most of them hand you a blank canvas and a styling panel, which quietly makes the formatting your job. Here is the difference between a builder and defaults that are already right.
Visualforce renderAs="pdf" is free and already in your org. Here is the decision framework for when it is genuinely enough, when it has quietly stopped being free, and what changes if you replace it.
Building document generation in-house looks cheap for the first document. Here is the honest cost model, the four questions that decide it, and the cases where building really is the right call.
Nested lists flatten, child-object tables lose their grouping, and images vanish when you export Salesforce data to Word. Here is why the merge model struggles with hierarchy, and when to stop using Word as the output format.
Salesforce CPQ quote templates cannot compute a monthly recurring total or subtotal a group of lines without a rollup field or a Visualforce section. Here is why, and how to get both declaratively.
Every field, flow, and object you built because your document tool could not produce the document you needed is a liability you keep paying for. Here is how to recognize docgen debt, audit how much your org carries, and stop creating more of it.
A phased migration playbook for replacing document generation in Salesforce: inventory and debt register, freeze the old system, migrate by pain, pilot with consenting users, keep a rollback path, and clean up the metadata that only existed to feed the old tool.
S-Docs already runs inside Salesforce, so the usual security and middleware arguments for switching do not apply. Here is what actually drives an S-Docs migration, what its HTML template model means for the move, and the SDoc records you must export before you uninstall.
PDF Butler splits its configuration between Salesforce records and its own service, which makes inventory easy on one side and a login-dependent exercise on the other. Here is how to plan the move: DocConfig sprawl, SOQL living in data sources, and the storage-versus-processing question a security review will ask.
What is specific about leaving Nintex DocGen: DocGen Packages that bundle several documents at once, data sources bound to reports and Visualforce pages, delivery options that are a second migration, and Apex in the loop namespace that blocks uninstall.
Replacing Docusign Gen does not mean replacing Docusign. Here is how to move document generation while leaving your envelopes, recipient routing, and audit trail alone: the anchor tags your new template must still emit, the custom XML holding your conditional logic, and what actually comes off the bill.
What is specific about leaving Conga Composer: merge queries holding undocumented business logic, button parameter strings that are the real spec, solution sprawl, and the Salesforce metadata that only ever existed to feed a merge.
When business rules live inside Word templates as field codes and macros, nobody can see or audit them without opening the file. Here is why that split logic is a liability, and how to keep document logic visible.
Forget the feature checklist for a moment. This is a comparison by outcome: what actually happens on the day a field is missing, a new category appears, compliance language changes, or the vendor raises the price.
We analyzed ~2,900 real Salesforce document-generation discussions. The most common word was not "bug" or "error": it was "workaround." Here is what teams are actually working around, and which of those problems have a structural fix.
A Word template that generates a clean document most of the time and a subtly broken one occasionally is not bad luck: it is how merge engines work. Here is the cause and a deterministic alternative.
