EchoSign, acquired by Adobe Systems last July, has created an integration of its electronic signature software with SharePoint.
The product, which goes live next week, brings signature capability to documents and lists, according to Mangesh Bhandarkar, EchoSign product manager at Adobe. Users can initiate signature workflows for documents from lists, or from an existing SharePoint workflow based on events, he said. “The signature happens in EchoSign, but all the information gets pushed back into SharePoint,” he explained.
The way EchoSign works is that when a document needs to be signed, an e-mail is sent with a link to the document. The process begins from receipt of that e-mail, through opening, through to when the signature gets captured back in EchoSign and the signed document flows back into SharePoint. “The integration allows reusable mapping, in that data (such as name, address or account number) can be taken from SharePoint and merged directly into the document that gets sent out for signature,” Bhandarkar said.
The keys to the EchoSign solution are that people don’t have to go to multiple systems to complete these tasks, that real-time updating of document and document status occurs, that a copy of the signed document is readily available in SharePoint, and there is audit information about what happened to the document during the workflow, he said.
