The Spring 08 discussion notes contain Meagan's summarised questions/comments raised during the meeting.  Thanks Meagan for letting me include them here.

Hi folks,

I have shot around an email to those who attended and wished to be listed so we can share questions and answers between meetings.  I will extend this further in subsequent meetings with a bit of a profile for each member to make this listing even more useful.

Holding our meeting prior to the salesforce.com City Tour session worked well.  We agreed to do this again.  At this stage we are planning a late June meeting which will be followed by a release update on the expectation (no promises!) that Summer 08 will have been released.  More on this later.

In this session I talked about External Attachments (PowerPoint presentation - 1,082KB).  External Attachments is a no charge App that saves you on Salesforce storage (very expensive) and retains the ability for you to search your documents with tools such as Windows Explorer.  I've made quite a few modifications to it and to suite our purposes and we now use it extensively.

I will let you know when we schedule our next meeting.  Please let me know if you have a topic you would like covered at the next meeting, particularly if its one you'd like to share / present.

Cheers.

Michael O'Leary

In this session I talked about Conga Merge (PowerPoint presentation - 506KB), a pay-for app that provides "A solution to merging across multiple Salesforce objects (and other stuff)".  Conga Merge allows you to do the things you want to do with Mail Merge but can't.  The product is well implemented and the support is excellent, usually same day response.

I wanted to be able to generate a form (Microsoft Word) by drawing data from data the Account Record, a linked Contact record (one with a specific role), the logged on user, a linked Contract record and two linked custom objects.  This would not be possible with Salesforce merge, but Conga Merge gets the job done.  It can also merge to Excel or Acrobat Reader formats.

Conga Merge can streamline routine mail merge and is advertised as being suitable for Custom quotes, proposals, account plans and more from any custom object and multiple related lists - as little as one click to print, attachment or email

Licensing is per Conga Merge user.  If you need to go beyond Salesforce Merge, give it a try.  It's rated with 5 stars on the AppExchange.

Cheers.

Michael O'Leary