There is a new tool on the market for document generation, which I had to try. I have great experience with S-Docs, so of course I compare those two and this comparison shows how new DocuSign Gen (DSG) is.
It is simple
First of all – when you install it, the UI is simple and quite sufficient. Five simple tabs in a form of wizard, which will get you through.
It looks sexy, until you switch on second tab with fields and you need to find those you want. There is one long list of all fields and related objects and you have to scroll up and down. And you have to add all of them, because they aren’t used to just give you the code but also query the database, so when you add different field to your (word) template you will get an error.
First comparison to S-Docs – you can use the fields to dynamically render parts of document, but you cannot set their format, how date should be visualised or what is the precission for numbers.
Otherwise the work is really easy – just open your Word document and copy and paste the field codes where you need them. Upload the document and select whether you want the output as Word document or PDF, which is better than in S-Docs, which – as far as I know – cannot convert the Word document to PDF.
Create a flow
DSG is Lightning first (I would say) and for each template it generates a button, which you add to page layout to be able to generate document from the template.
It is great, until you have more than a few templates per object. Then the S-Docs‘ approach, which allows you to select which documents you want to generate (and support one click generation as well) is better.
S-Docs is also able to generate documents on background by creating a job record. DSG doesn’t have anything like this, the only thing you can do (with a bit of development skills) is to tweak the default Lightning Component it generates for each template to allow its use in flows and then you are able to generate the documents directly from flows.
Integration with DocuSign
I remember days, when S-Docs has been integrated with DocuSign, but it isn’t the case anymore. So I somehow expect than DSG will be integrated and I would be able with one click to generate document and send it for signature.
Not the case, it might be in a roadmap, but now the approach is, that you generate the document with one click, you want to check it anyway and then you send it with another click to DocuSign. Make sense, but still, the one click approach would be awesome.
User management
Good to remember, that you have to add users, which are allowed to use DocuSign Gen. What might be surprising (for you and for them), that they will get an email with confirmation link, which they have to click and create their account on DocuSign website. Not sure why, but it is definitely something you have to communicate with them, otherwise they will just ignore the email (especially as the link doesn’t work when you are in trial) and then be surprised that the document generation doesn’t work.
Conclusion
A while ago I tested a bunch of different solution and S-Docs came out of it as a winner. The UI might not be the best and most sexy, but the price/feature ration is definitelly one of the best I saw.
I miss the Word -> PDF conversion a lot and it is the reason why I really like DocuSign Gen. A few more improvements, which will came over next a few month I’m sure, and it will be even better player than now and I might switch to it.
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