While speaking with Greg Ryan, Senior Marketing Director for Canon, I learned not only that Canon is a huge customer of Salesforce, but also what inspired them to create Forms and Print Services for Salesforce. During our conversation, I could relate from my own client experiences that users want more control over the presentation of their Salesforce data than what is possible “out-of-the-box.” Canon’s Forms and Print Services allows you to create and control the distribution of complex visual documents, and present your data in tables, charts and graphs, and even include photos.

Greg taught me that:

  1. The need for visually appealing, customer facing documents will likely never go away, and Admins need a way to accommodate requests for highly tailored layouts, for example, to include photos

  2. Users want control. With filters they can choose to include as little or as much data as the want in a document and decide when and where they print

  3. Canon’s relationship with FedEx Office provides mobile professionals a printer on the road. They can send the print job to the cloud where it can be retrieved at over 1800 locations

  4. While users love to open Salesforce and run meetings from their Dashboards, there are plenty of executives and managers that still want to hold paper in their hands. Canon’s Forms and Print Services lets you bypass the error prone drudgery of exporting the data locally and manipulating it before printing

So, what’s the real experience?

  • By filtering, users can select only what’s important in Salesforce before generating a document

  • As an Admin I can provide execs and managers great-looking weekly or monthly reports, without dumping the data to Excel or PowerPoint

  • As a sales rep I can send great looking documents to one of 1800+ FedEx Office locations so I can respond quickly to my clients while on the road

Behind the Scenes:

Forms and Prints Services for Salesforce empowers users by allowing them to select what’s important as well as when and where to print - so you show up to your client meeting with stunning documents in hand.

Learn more:

Check out the Forms and Print Services for Salesforce listing on the AppExchange.

About the Author:

Shell Black is president of ShellBlack.com, a Salesforce Cloud Alliance Partner. In addition to being a Salesforce MVP, Shell is also a certified Sales Cloud Consultant, Administrator, and Developer. He loves sharing his Salesforce consulting knowledge earned from delivering over a 100 implementations since 2005. Shell has presented at Dreamforce multiple times and is the host of ShellBlack Whiteboard – a video series devoted to educating people on how to get the most out of the Salesforce platform.

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