Unlimited DocTypes Increase Document Automation Capabilities
Last month, with the renaming of our document automation software from PriceQuote to SalesDoc Architect (SDA), one of the great features that we added was the ability to create an unlimited number of document types (or “DocTypes”) that you can use to categorize document sections in the document library. When document outputs are generated, SDA uses the DocType you’ve selected for the particular output to filter the document sections that are included in the final output Word document.
Let’s say you want to generate a proposal. By choosing to output only doc sections with DocType = “Proposal”, SDA will filter the output to include only those doc sections in the final output document. This makes it very easy to create new types of outputs simply by creating a new DocType, then tagging the doc sections you want to include in the new output with the new DocType.
Unlimited DocTypes become even more helpful when they are used in combination with other means of configuring the document sections that will appear on the outputs. For example, let’s assume that you have associated part numbers with doc sections in the SalesDoc Architect database as follows…
| Part Number | Associated Doc Section | Doc Section’s DocType |
| XYZ | XYZ-Benefits | Proposal |
| XYZ | XYZ-Features | Proposal |
| XYZ | XYZ-SOWIntro | SOW |
| XYZ | XYZ-SOWDetails | SOW |
| XYZ | XYZ-InstallInstructions | InternalInstallDoc |
What this means is that when part numbers are configured using SDA’s product configuration capabilities (or imported from a manufacturer’s configuration tool), the doc sections will be auto-configured to appear in the document outputs due to the associations between the part numbers and the doc sections.
Fortunately, we won’t get all of the associated doc sections in the table above when we generate an output; rather, we’ll only get the doc sections that pertain to the type of document we’d like to generate. So, when a proposal is generated, only the XYZ-Benefits and XYZ-Features doc sections will be included in the output document, whereas when we generate a statement of work (SOW), only the XYZ-SOWIntro XYZ-SOWDetails doc sections will be assembled into the final output document.