Adobe has announced a series of enhancements to its Document Cloud's e-sign capabilities, but the most important aspect of the release for customers is an expanded partner program that integrates the product into Salesforce, Workday and SAP Ariba. From the release:
Workday—Speed business processes with e-signature capabilities pre-integrated into Workday’s built-in business process framework. The integration provides Workday customers that purchase Adobe eSign services with the ability to add e-signatures to over 400 business processes across the entire Workday application suite to help save time, reduce errors and legal risk, increase compliance, and improve employee experiences.
Salesforce—Simplify the setup, use and management of signature workflows for sales via the #1 customer-rated e-signature solution for Salesforce. The latest eSign services update delivers an easy-to-use setup wizard, automates common tasks like adding product lists to agreements, and supports certificate-based digital signatures. And, it’s native on the Salesforce Platform and fully certified with the Lightning app builder framework.
Ariba—Streamline the procurement process through greater flexibility, security and control when sending contracts for e-signature in Ariba Contract Management. The latest eSign services integration enables users to add multiple signers, define signing order, and verify signers with multi-factor authentication.
The release includes many new features of general interest to enterprises as well, such as support for the newer digital signature format that will be adopted across the EU next year, a new workflow designer, an improved mobile app, and automatic e-signature sync across mobile, web and the desktop.
The Bottom Line
Such features are welcome given the rapid growth in e-signatures around the world, but also to be expected as Adobe evolves its product. The most significant part of Adobe's announcement is the tie-ins to Workday, Salesforce and Ariba, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky.
"Having digital signatures embedded into the business workflows that people use for HR, sales, marketing, finance and other processes eliminates the need to switch back and forth between multiple tools," Lepofsky says. "For example, a sales rep does not want to be working in Salesforce, then have to switch over to email and send a contract back and forth to get signatures. Having digital signatures embedded into processes helps drive adoption."
