What in the Education Cloud: DocGen

In this latest installment of Salesforce Education Cloud for Recruiting and Admissions, we are going to tackle what is perhaps the easiest recommendation we can make regarding all of the features and functions available within the standard offering: Salesforce Document Generation.

TL;DR, and not to bury the lede—we do not recommend that any school use this capability at this time.

And now, the rest of the story

The promise of DocGen is tremendous—a native solution to generate documents from existing Word and PowerPoint files. The uses of this within higher education are tremendous—everything from offer letters, receipts for application fees and enrollment deposits, and especially later things like transcripts, diplomas, and invoices for continuing education can use DocGen's capability.

So why don't we recommend it?

The functionality is based on OmniStudio, which, in our very first article found here, we said we only recommend to schools with significant developer capabilities. However, we go beyond that with DocGen and unequivocally state that it is truly not worth implementing. The specific reasons for that both have to do with the actual product and comparison with alternatives.

As far as DocGen as an offering, it is problematic. As is the case with OmniStudio itself, so many aspects of it are undocumented or untested. In our implementations, we repeatedly found issues with functions that are described one way but behave differently or are not documented. The code is so finicky and sensitive that a successfully working document would work one day and not at all the next, and then, either randomly or after a patch, work again. Additionally, we've spent literally over 100 hours in one instance trying to maintain specific formatting necessary to produce a transcript and still had to settle for less than a desired outcome. It is incredibly labor-intensive to both stand up and maintain on a regular basis.

Comparison with alternatives

Contrast that with the tools we've been using forever to deliver this functionality. Third-party tools like Conga, Apsona, Nitex, etc. While yes, these carry an additional licensing cost, implementing and maintaining these solutions is straightforward compared to DocGen, simple. In a typical implementation, a third-party-based document generation solution would be a fraction of the cost of Salesforce DocGen. As a result, the ease and consistency of the solution make the total cost of ownership of any of these add-ons significantly less than that of the DocGen. It's not even close.

So, in conclusion, there are a lot of "depends" on our recommendations regarding the features and functions of Salesforce's Education Cloud. DocGen is not one of those. As of the time of this post, which is early December 2024, there is no "depends" here – Conga, Apsona, or any other similar solution is almost guaranteed to be a better value and a better solution.