Conga

These notes are based on Conga Version 7. Version 8 is a bit nicer. 

Conga Experience

• From the Opportunity record click Conga Composer.
• The Conga window pops up, after quite a while of looking at the spinny wheel.
• There is far too much info on this screen (Also, this is how you get to the template builder - the tiny tiny link at the bottom of the page - you would never know it is there).
• There is a small radio button for using emails or letters - this should not be an option - it should just be a communication. 

• To send just an email, without a file you have to click NONE on the File Templates (above), then choose the email templates. Annoying (yes, I know you can make a button to do this automatically, but then you end up with 15 buttons on the page). So, you are going to need an additional help document to explain, "when you are at this stage of the opportunity, open Conga, click these 16 buttons in this order, then you can get an email"). 
• Choose Email Templates.

• You choose the format - why on earth would you want to send an email with no body and an acrobat attachments (actually, it does nothing if you are just sending an email, which is confusing to the users). 
• The Contact can be selected - weirdly positioned at the bottom of the screen - this should be the first thing to see and do on the page - who are you sending it to? 
• You can choose to log it or have automatic logging - this should be set by the admin - not the user. and you can choose to ignore it. Not good. 
• You can set a follow up task, which is good. 
• The biggest button is Log Activity - what actually does that do - just logs the activity and not send it? Well it seems to merge, but the window just stays there. So, it merges the email, and creates an activity out of it, and that's it - what is the point of that? (except for maybe some internal reporting). 
• Then you can Merge - what does that do? It just creates a document that you can download. This is so you can preview the merge document. However, I clicked on an email template - not a document template - why is it giving me a document when I want an email? This is bizarre.
• There is also the Email button. The fact that it has a message about not doing anything else whilst the wheel spins tells you how slow it is. 
• The standard Salesforce email window is displayed. 

• It's got this weird thing about relating it to a Conga Email Staging record. Now how do you explain this silly techy thing to basic users (yes, I've read the help documents and I understand what it is). 
• From here, you can select an Email Template - but no, there are none of your email templates in here, because Conga Email Templates are not Salesforce Email Templates.
• And after all that, and sending your nice email out, it does NOT attach the PDF that you added as an attachment to the Template email. Weird. 
• And after all that, I can't use Conga because I can't send attachments that have been uploaded to the Opportunity record as part of my email (without another separate paid plugin).  

Conga Email Help Document 

Yes, I know Conga is a great product and does just about everything, but I'm just not a fan. Sorry. Uninstalling Conga.