The capabilities of Document Generation, or DocGen, are made completely visible in Conga CLM. Conga CLM has extended document generation beyond the Agreement and Quote/Proposal object to cover the standard Salesforce objects and custom objects.

The Conga CLM Suite uses the following components in the generation of documents:

  • Conga CLM application is 100% native on the Salesforce platform – Includes custom objects, tabs, Apex classes and Visual force pages on the Salesforce platform.
  • Merge Web Service hosted on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) stacks – A stateless service which includes .NET components for generating Word and PDF documents using data from Salesforce. No data is persistent in this component.
  • X-Author for Contracts Add-in to Microsoft Word – A .NET-based add-in to Microsoft Word used for creating and managing merge templates and for generating and managing contract documents throughout the negotiation stage of the cycle.



The following steps are performed during the document generation process:

  1. The document generation process is initiated when you use the Conga CLM application in the following scenarios.
    • Select the document attributes, such as output format, protection type, and a template (including defined structured data fields in clauses with terms and conditions).
    • Click Generate for the supported objects. To view the list of supported objects, refer Document Generation Features List.
  2. The Conga CLM application uses Apex code in Salesforce to make an HTTPS Web Service call to the Merge Service endpoint using the REST API .
  3. The Apex controller passes to the Merge Service the current user’s session ID and the endpoint server URL obtained using the {!$Api.Session_ID} and {!$Api.Partner_Server_URL_250} Visualforce variables.
  4. No logging occurs on the Merge Service which would capture the information, such as SessionId or agreement details, moving through the Merge Service.
  5. The Merge Service uses the session ID and endpoint server URL to establish a session with Salesforce. The mechanism is similar to Salesforce Workflow Outbound Messaging, allowing session information to be passed for a callback.
  6. The Merge Service retrieves from the Conga CLM application the contract object record’s user-selected Microsoft Word template and the data for the merge fields embedded in the template.
  7. The Merge Service merges the data and produces the contract document in the user-selected format: DOC, RTF, DOCX, or PDF.
  8. The generated contract document is stored in Salesforce as an attachment to the agreement record.
  9. Errors encountered in the document generation process are displayed to the user from the contract management application in Salesforce, where you initiated the generation command for the document.
  10. All details are removed from the Amazon EC2 web servers when the document generation process has been completed. No data is stored in the Merge Service since all data is stored only in Salesforce.