Towson University is a public university in Towson, Maryland, and one of the largest public institutions in the state. Founded in 1866 as Maryland’s first training school for teachers, Towson has grown into an eight-college institution with more than 20,000 students and a 329-acre campus north of Baltimore.
Today, it stands as Maryland’s #1 public university (according to Wall Street Journal), recognized for inclusive excellence, social mobility, research, and real-world experiential learning. Beyond impactful teaching, Towson drives interdisciplinary research and community-centered innovation that serves the public good.
To better understand Towson University’s document management challenges and how PDF Butler helped transform their processes, we spoke with Kevin Webb, CRM Manager at Towson University.
Salesforce at the Center of Campus Operations
Kevin oversees Salesforce for the entire university:
“I am the CRM Manager at Towson University… I oversee a single Salesforce org and have a team of three people. Towson is really the university of CRM — it tracks many of the interactions our faculty, staff, and students have with the university.”
Salesforce supports a wide range of processes across campus, including:
- Event registrations
- Email communications
- Alumni outreach
- Donor management
- Graduate recruitment
- Application workflows
With around a million contacts in Salesforce, the platform plays a central role in enabling consistent communication that typically goes out through their system.
The Challenge: A Tool That No Longer Fit Their Needs
Before adopting PDF Butler, Towson University used another well-known tool for generating documents. While the vendor had served them for several years, the tool grew increasingly misaligned with Towson’s needs.
Kevin explains, “For our business needs (which are actually pretty simple), that product really was kind of overkill for us.”
The university faced three major challenges:
- Rising Costs
“Their costs were going up and up… and nothing they were offering was anything we foresaw we were going to use.”
- Complexity
“We found the product to be rather challenging to use, and especially challenging to modify. Anytime someone asked for a new document merge process, we’d think: that’s going to be 15–20 hours of work.”
- Slow Development Cycles
Even simple template updates or field adjustments required extensive effort and often risked breaking the merge logic.
“It was so hard to move around merge fields… it was so sensitive, you’d break the formatting.”
The team knew they needed a solution that was easy, flexible, and fast to scale across departments.
Finding PDF Butler
In the search for a replacement, Kevin’s team turned to the Salesforce AppExchange.
“I tasked a team member: go to AppExchange… anything with an exceptional rating, bring it in. And let’s see if we can get a trial version in the sandbox so that we can configure it and see how easy it is to set up. And there were a few competitors that were out there, and so PDF Butler was one of them.”
PDF Butler quickly stood out among competitors due to:
- Ease of setup
- Fast configuration
- Simple scaling
- Clear value for cost
“Once we worked with PDF Butler in a sandbox, my team member said, ‘This really is the easiest product to use.’” Kevin shared.
Implementation: Up and Running in Just a Few Months
Towson University purchased PDF Butler in late November and began training in January. Despite holiday closures and reduced staffing time:
“We were up and running by late January. Within three months, we had everything replaced.”
This timeline allowed them to terminate their old vendor contract with full confidence:
“We were confident enough in the processes we set up using PDF Butler that we didn’t need to continue with our legacy product.”
Their approach was automation-first: documents are automatically created behind the scenes and attached in Salesforce with no need for each department to access or manage templates directly.
“Your automation tools make it flexible for us… it’s easier if we keep development within our team while offices get documents automatically once or twice a day.”
Results & Key Improvements
- Massive Cost Savings
Kevin highlights this as one of the biggest wins:
“Your product was fractionally the cost of what we were using before… maybe 40% of the cost. It honestly underscores how much we were overpaying for the old product.”
- Dramatically Faster Development
“Something that would take half a week is something we can accomplish with your product in a matter of hours.”
- Ease of Editing and Template Management
This is where Kevin emphasized PDF Butler “excels”:
“Your product makes it so much easier to move things around in the Word template and make dynamic documents based on relevant data on the related records. It works the way other products should have worked.”
- Improved User Experience Across Campus
Offices now get their documents automatically, without needing to manage templates.
“Users are happy… A process runs once or twice a day, and they have the document they need at the start of the next day. The combination of immediate and scheduled batch processing eliminates the need for end users to click a button to generate – it’s attached to the record when the user expects it to be.”
- A Partnership They Value
Kevin repeatedly emphasized the support experience:
“Your teams have been responsive and helpful; we really appreciate the partnership.”
Looking Ahead
With nearly a year of successful usage, PDF Butler has become a trusted part of their Salesforce ecosystem, offering scalability, simplicity, and significant savings.
