Keeping up with your outstanding orders and agreements is one of the key benefits of an electronic signature solution. Using the SmartSign Tracker feature allows our customers to rapidly identify sticking points in their business. The Tracker allows you to search by date range, status, or a variety of other unique identifiers. Search results are displayed by Transaction Identifier, Status, or Creation Date.
Once you’ve located the correct transaction, the Tracker allows you to drill down to see exactly where the transaction is in the workflow.
The Tracker shows the status of each participant within the transaction.
If you required a participant to go through additional identification screening – the Tracker shows a pass or fail indicator for each participant.
If one of your signers is slowing down the process – quickly send a gentle reminder invitation to him.
If the terms of the agreement have changed – the Tracker allows you to rescind the transaction or upload a new version of any document to the transaction and send out an updated invitation.
What about those pesky customer support calls? Maybe your signer “misplaced” her security code – use the Tracker to look up the code for her.
As you can see, the Tracker helps keep all your deals “on track”.
Access to up-to-date information is rapidly becoming the standard for users armed with the latest Smart Phone technology. Most of us have an “app” for getting the latest news, weather, sports scores, whatever we want to know when we want to know it. Business users are no different, in fact for those of us that travel a lot or have the benefit of working remotely, access to information we need to get the job done is critical. And a big part of getting the job done often involves getting signatures on documents from your customers, partners, or employees. Whether it is a new contract, a mutual non-disclosure, a real estate agreement or a beneficiary form – having the ability to track where it is in the process is crucial to your business.
With the latest version of eOriginal Command Center we enable you to satisfy your need for “information when I want it, where I want it.” Command Center automatically detects when you are on a mobile device and adapts the user experience to the capabilities of the device. Once you have logged into the application, you can quickly search for outstanding transactions by date sent, status or both. The results are displayed back in seconds and allow you to drill down to see all the details about the transaction. Is one of your deals “stuck” waiting on someone to sign a contract? Simply send out an email reminder to the customer, or all participants, right from your phone. So now, wherever you are you can keep up with your business and keep information moving as fast as you are!
For those customers who have taken the time to tryout our our new version on Preview On Demand, you have probably already experienced the new Workspace. Yes, we did it. We merged the SmartSign Web and Command Center user interfaces into a single application. The “new” Command Center user interface has undergone a significant update, making it much easier for you to locate, manage, and interact with your transactions and documents.
But our engineers were not just satisfied with a simple user interface refresh, they spent a lot of time “under the hood” optimizing the way you can search for documents and transaction, implementing (geek alert) Ajax to enable you to quickly page through large result sets, reorder lists, change the order of table rows in results, and introduced the new Snapshot view. The Snapshot “shows itself” anytime you click on a transaction, giving you a fast-yet-comprehensive view of the transaction. From the Snapshot, you can…
View all the documents associated with the transaction,
View the document histories on each document,
Retrieve a copy of a document,
Retrieve a Document Activity History Report (PDF),
and much more…try it out
But one of my favorite features of the new Workspace is Collections. There are two types of collections; transaction and document. To create a collection, simply click Add from the Collections list on the left side of the page. Type in the name of your collection and a new collection is added to your list. Now all you have to do is search for transactions (or documents) using the search feature at the top of the page. Click on the transactions you want and drag them over to the collection. The selected transactions are automatically added as members of the collection.
Once you have created a collection, you can perform all kinds of batch actions on its members. Maybe you need to delete obsolete or incomplete transactions, or transfer control to a partner, or destroy signed Electronic Originals that have passed their retention period. All these actions (and more) are available to you by clicking on the little arrow to the right of the collection name. Of course, all available actions are limited to your permissions in the trusted repository.
So go ahead, log into Preview and create a collection.
SmartSign offers a number of methods for keeping track of your signer’s activities. The integrated Signature Tracker allows you to search for pending, in process and completed transactions in an ad hoc fashion, and to filter the results by date, status and other parameters. In another issue I’ll go into more detail on that, but this week I’ll talk about Email Notifications.
To enable email notifications, you need to be assigned a SmartSign administrator permission. If you do not see Branding Options under the Administration drop down menu, contact your company’s administrator or our support team. If you have access to the Branding Options page, click on the Workflow tab. Under the Email Notifications section, you will see a link to “Add a New Notification Rule For:” [action]. The list of actions includes when a signer enters, withdraws, completes signing, etc. Select your desired action and click the link.
The notification dialog pops up and allows you to define your recipients. You can address the notification email to specific email addresses or distribution groups. You can also tell SmartSign to copy the sender of the original signature invitation. Additional users can be copied or blind copied, depending on your business rules.
Some actions allow you to also include attachments, such as copies of the documents and a detailed history report. Attachments always come in Adobe PDF format. The history report includes all the user events recorded on the document, plus detailed signature information if the user has completed the signing process.
Click Save and you are done. Your new email notification rule will fire automatically the next time your configured event is triggered within SmartSign.
Online document collaboration with Google Apps allows users to easily create, review, comment and edit documents in real time. This new interaction paradigm has displaced the time consuming process of creating a document, emailing the stakeholders, getting comments back, finding the comments, editing the document, emailing stakeholders (again!), and so forth. This has been a very slow way of collaborating on an agreement or contract – any document really. The same thing can be said of the paper based processes employed when those documents need to be signed and counter signed.
Printing documents simply to capture signatures introduces significant lag in the “closing” process, often results in not in good order (NIGO) documents, and triggers additional slowdown in completion as employees deal with mail, faxing, scanning, indexing and filing.
Now you can take advantage of Google Apps enhanced collaboration tools with SmartSign’s powerful electronic signature solution. Simply link your Google Apps account with your SmartSign account and you can begin sending invitations for participants to electronically sign the documents. The process can be further automated by leveraging predefined signature templates. If you need to include additional standard forms that do not change across transactions, our forms library makes it fast and easy to have those automatically included with your Google Apps documents. Best of all, SmartSign keeps you in the loop as each signer completes the process and it can automatically push electronic copies into your CRM or imaging systems.
With Google Apps + SmartSign Web your transactions are completed faster, with fewer errors and more securely.
Electronic signature association’s annual conference highlights how organizations are achieving mainstream adoption and process improvements within financial services, healthcare, government and insurance industries.
eOriginal, Inc., a pioneer and industry leader in electronic signatures, vaulted repository and electronic transactions, is a founding member of the Electronic Signature and Records Association (ESRA). As Chairman of ESRA, eOriginal Chief Executive Mr. Stephen Bisbee is privileged to lead the ESRA E-Signatures 2010 conference in Washington D.C. on November 9th and 10th.
“The ESRA Board and membership have worked diligently to secure a strong collection of speakers and panelists to provide in-depth analysis of the adoption and acceptance of electronic signature solutions throughout a variety of industries and business processes and to provide the most incisive and timely information possible on legal trends, best practices, and an array of national and international legislative, regulatory and industry issues,” said Mr. Bisbee.
The purpose of ESRA is to promote awareness, understanding and adoption of electronic signature and records. ESRA focuses on education on the benefits afforded by implementing automated electronic transactions with eSignatures and eRecords and providing a forum to address issues related to electronic signatures and records, including legislative support.
During the course of the conference, attendees will have an opportunity to learn and share experiences from several leading implementers of electronic signature solutions, including:
Approaches and best practices for implementing eMortgages
Moving to electronic business processes in the insurance industry
Challenges and approaches to signer identity management
Integrating electronic signature solutions with existing systems to achieve straight-through processing
Need to get that contract executed today, but your VP is sitting in the airport heading to a conference?
The popularity of mobile devices like Apple’s iPad and iPhone make it easy to share contract documents anywhere, anytime so why not take it to the next step and use SmartSign Web to sign and close the deal?
The iPad holds the particular promise to accelerate the mass adoption of electronic signatures because it has the screen real estate to view the entire document. Imagine walking into your local bank to open an account and the bank employee hands you an iPad to affix your signature to the account application or the check signature card. Or when you are returning a vehicle off lease at the dealership, quickly go through the vehicle inspection and sign off right there with the iPad.
Contract modifications are another excellent opportunity to leverage mobile signing. Typically any change to an agreement or contract requires senior management approval and sign-off. These executives travel often, so why not allow them to access, review and execute documents in the airport, at the conference or in the hotel? With an iPad and SmartSign Web they can.
And going paperless isn’t just doing business faster at less cost, it can also have a big impact on your corporate image from both the environmental impact and heightened customer experience when they complete a transaction in a single process.
Best of all, SmartSign Web puts all this flexibility and power in your hands while protecting your business by ensuring compliance with the ESIGN electronic signature requirements. SmartSign Web’s secure and comprehensive audit trail maintains legal admissibility and enforceability of all your important business records. Now that is the best of both worlds.
The latest release of our premier electronic signature process management system, SmartSign Web, includes the ability to sign commonly used business documents created in popular Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This new capability also enables users to add scanned images and IBM Lotus Notes documents into SmartSign for electronic signature capture. New documents uploaded into the system are quickly converted into Adobe PDF for review and signature capture.
This new feature allows users to create custom documents and quickly add them to a transaction for signature. The SmartSign template designer’s easy to use drag-and-drop interface can still be utilized to mark up the documents for data collection and signature capture. These custom documents are automatically integrated with standard forms already managed by SmartSign and eCore, allowing more flexibility for complex business transactions that often require unique documents based on business rules.
This capability is not limited to the creation and send process, downstream participants of a transaction can also upload documents such as attachments in any of the new supported formats. These documents will also be dynamically converted to PDF and added to the transaction. For example, if a user must upload a scanned image of his drivers license. The scanned TIFF or GIF image can be uploaded directly into SmartSign. The user does not have to learn how to convert the scanned documents into PDF or perform any post-scanning process on the image.
Benefits
Leverage existing investment in familiar document creation tools
Quickly send out custom documents for signature
Increase employee productivity by eliminating document conversion and processing tasks
Speed time to close business transactions with streamlined business processes that eliminate paper distribution and handling
Improve security with tamper-evident seals on documents and the detailed audit trail
This is only one of the hundreds of new capabilities featured in the latest release of SmartSign and eCore. Check back here over the next few days as we share more of the features available; such as advanced configuration options, workflow automation tools, tighter integration with internal applications, and more!
Transitioning your document-centric business processes from paper to fully electronic is not ‘one size fits all’, which is why we chose to focus on providing more configuration options and work flow flexibility in our latest release. Based on feedback from the inaugural meeting of our User Group, the product team went to work adding new features requested by the users. The majority of requests centered on adding more configuration options for signers and dealing with ancillary documents within SmartSign Web. Below I’ve written about just a few of the 85 new features and enhancements available in the 6.6 release coming this May!
Wet-Ink Signed Documents – Many of our customer’s transactions contain multiple documents that require signature, and sometimes there are regulatory, risk, or government agency requirements to submit a paper document with written signatures on one or more of those documents. SmartSign Web now allows you to flag a document or documents for wet-ink signature in the electronic transaction. The signer will be prompted to print and sign the document and you can provide additional instructions on where to send the paper signed documents. All other documents will be electronically signed and protected in the Trusted Repository. Additionally, SmartSign Web will record the user’s print action in the audit trail of each wet-ink signed document.
Signer Attached Documents – Many times there are ancillary, or supplementary documents needed from the signer in order to continue a business process – beyond simply the capture of signatures. Now you can configure SmartSign Web to prompt your signers to upload scanned documents into the package. Uploaded documents may be flagged as required or optional, depending on your business process. Uploaded documents are automatically added to the electronic transaction and stored in the Trusted Repository alongside the electronically signed documents.
New Signature Collection Modes – SmartSign Web now offers you the ability to configure the method in which signers enter their signatures in the signing room. The familiar all-in-one mode allows the signer to enter multiple signatures in a single collection form, which is great for internal or repeat signers that want to quickly complete the process. The new interactive collection mode requires your signer to click on “sign here” blocks within each document to enter their signature. The interactive collection mode also enables you to turn on (or off) a quick navigation feature that allows the signers to easily navigate between signature blocks and initial areas. SmartSign Web remembers the signers typed signature, uploaded image signature, or written signature from a signing pad as the user navigates between the signature areas.
Contact our support team or a sales representative to learn more about these exciting features or for a personalized demonstration.
The latest release of our SmartSign Web electronic signature service and eCore® electronic vault focused on simplifying document review and signature capture. Employing electronic signatures must be easier for your customers than the paper process, and release 6 simplifies signature capture into three easy steps, while maintaining compliance with electronic signature requirements and best practices.
Simple 3-Step Electronic Signature Process
We recognize that the electronic signature process will always be compared to the paper-based wet ink signatures. That is why we focused on simplification in this release. Signers are walked through a simple three step process, including disclosure and consent, signature capture, and receiving a copy of the signed documents. At each step, SmartSign ensures compliance with the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and federal E-SIGN signature requirements. The signers can pull up context sensitive help at each step in the process, and the entire process can be completed in a few minutes!
Signer Identity Verification
Many organizations are struggling with new government regulations, identity theft, and multi-factor authentication. eOriginal has integrated an electronic identify verification service into the signature experience, which includes a verification against the government OFAC database (i.e. Patriot Act Compliance) and presents signers with out-of-wallet questions from permissible use public databases. The results of the identify verification are recorded in the document audit trail, and you have the option to store the questions, responses and results in an encrypted Verification Report.
Integrate Your Way!
So you want to begin now with electronic signatures, but your IT organization is overloaded with projects? Don’t want to send your customers to a third-party website to sign your documents? Have a high-volume business that does not lend itself to your employees logging into a web site to upload documents and send invitations? Want to have the signing experience branded as your own? SmartSign Web offers zero-integration deployment, embedding the Signature Room right in your website, and automated document upload and signature preparation within your document generation/origination system. Flexibility is key to a successful electronic signature implementation, and eOriginal offers you the most options in the market today.
eCore® 6 simplifies electronic signatures and provides the flexibility you need to successfully deploy a truly paperless transaction environment.
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