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”.

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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!

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I often speak with security alarm companies on the benefits of eOrignal’s SmartSign- electronic signature solutions. You may or may not be surprised by the various departments, processes and workflows where SmartSigning has proven to be beneficial in the Alarm industry; including contracting new clients through inside and outside sales, HR/ employee onboarding, and customer retention/ renewals, just to name a few.

One particular area that I have found to require a large amount of company resources and focus has been client retention and customer renewals. Which in most cases bring with it a cumbersome paper process, customer inconvenience and unfortunately customer drop off. How you re-contract today will have direct influence on your companies RMR tomorrow- whether it be negative or positive; of course the goal would be the later.

As old contracts begin to expire, eOriginal’s SmartSign provides Alarm companies the advantage of re-contracting with only the click of a button. Most importantly, it provides a faster, friendlier and more convenient customer experience. Some of the immediate benefits include,

• Increased employee productivity- now sales and retention departments can complete these tasks in half the time.

• Decreased mailing, paper, shipping, and postage cost

• Improved customer experience and relations

• Ability to have same day, even same hour client renewals

How this works:

eOriginal can tie into your existing CRM; with the click of a button we will automatically pull client information from your CRM, add it to the new contract in the appropriate fields, and send your customer an invitation to sign. Your customer then is guided through an easy and intuitive eSigning contract renewal process by eOriginal’s SmartSign.

You can see how this process works by going to eOriginal’s Security Alarm demonstration page by clicking here.

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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.

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Do you need to send the same document to a large list of recipients and request that each sign his own instance of the document?  Do you know that doing so is now easier than ever with eOriginal SmartSign?

Let’s walk through a very simple example for requesting that all 333 employees at Acme Organization sign the new Acme HR Policy Guide.  We are going to define a single transaction with a single instance of the Acme HR Policy Guide, and magically, all 333 Acme employees will receive an email requesting they review and sign the guide…

In the SmartSign Setup application, choose to create a New Transaction.  Give the transaction a name to be used as the base transaction ID (let’s use “Acme HR Policy Guide”) and fill in the rest of the transaction properties (status, expiration date, etc.) as you normally do.   Click on the ‘Additional Information’ link to expand that section.   In the ‘Generate Multiple Copies’ field, type “333″.

Now go through the steps to add a document and define the signature template as if you were creating a single transaction for a single employee.

When  you get to the role mapping page you will be prompted to upload a .csv file containing the name, email address, and security codes for each employee.

.csv files can be easily generated via various spreadsheet and database applications.  The .csv file should not include any column headings and should list each recipient in the following format:

First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Email Address, Security Code

(note if no Middle Name is available, a place-holder for its value must still be defined.)

Craft your email text and click to ‘Send’…all 333 Acme employees have just received your email with the link to review and sign the new HR Policy Guide.  Now wasn’t that easy!

Additional Tips:

• The number of entries in the .csv file must match the number of transaction copies requested.
• Multiple roles may participate in ‘bulk mail’ transactions.  The actual signers playing each role may be defined by either uploading a separate .csv file for each role or by defining a specific individual to play that role across all transactions.  When uploading multiple .csv files, be sure the signers are listed in the order they should be ‘paired up’.

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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.

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In today’s modern world it seems we have all been tied to our smart phones for years now. We have been able to check our emails at the airport, send out status updates from the bar during happy hour, now you can easily sign your documents on the go.

eOriginal’s latest SmartSign release brings enhanced on-the go signing right to your finger tips. With no apps to install, simply click on a link in your email and the SmartSign Signature Service will launch right in your browser. SmartSign will detect if you are using a mobile device and display an optimized signing room for your device. If you are on a device with a smaller screen, you will receive a more streamlined signing experience. If you are on a larger mobile device, like an iPad, you will see the more robust signing room with some device specific enhancements.

After entering the signing room SmartSign will detect you are on an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPodTouch, etc), and will automatically convert any non-text signatures (mouse signatures, image signatures, pad based signatures) right to finger signatures. As you interact with the signing room you will be prompted to sign each location with the touch of your finger.

SmartSign Web also supports all of the gestures we have become accustomed to in our iOS devices. These gestures include things like, pinching in and out to zoom, or scrolling inner content with two fingers, even rotate your device and watch the Signing Room adjust so that you may view and interact with your documents how you want.

To read more about mobile signing check out our other blog articles: Electronic Signatures Enable Mobile Sales Teams to Close More Deals and Customer Spotlight: Elite EXTRA Integration and Mobile eSigning

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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.

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I recently had the opportunity to attend the 2011 National Automobile Dealers Association EXPO in San Francisco, CA. I used my time to speak with auto dealers, lenders, as well as service providers. You can imagine the joy I felt as I learned, across the board, that business process optimization, including the use of electronic signatures, has become a key focus in the future of the industry. One of the consistent topics of my discussions was how to create a faster more efficient process that saves money, resources and time, increasing revenue!

This got me to thinking about how eOriginal and electronic signatures have evolved since the signing of the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) in 1999 and the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) in 2000.  More so than ever before, businesses are recognizing the value of streamlining costly business processes, creating friendlier client and employee experiences.  eOriginal SmartSign has since processed millions of e-signature events each year, streamlining a variety of business processes, some of which we didn’t think about.  Our innovative clients helped to provide the vision- What are some of the processes it is used for today?

• Automotive lending, lease and dealer agreements

• Consumer and Commercial Loans

• HR forms and On-boarding documentation

• Home and Commercial security contracts

• Equipment Lease Agreements

• Student enrollment and financial aid forms

• Insurance applications and acceptance forms

• Logistics and Proof of Delivery forms

• Accounting and Tax forms

• General Contracts/Agreements, NDAs

• Property rental and lease contracts

• Healthcare forms

• And just about any other Document-Oriented Transaction requiring a signature

My list could continue, but my point here is, don’t take anything off the table. Look at your business from the outside in.  Find the areas that have proven to be costly and ask yourself – Why? Some of the unfailing answers that you may come across are almost always related to the process in which one’s job is executed. This process often includes the scanning, faxing, copying, printing, filing, finding, mailing and shipping of documents, many of which require some sort of signature.

For more than 15 years, eOriginal has assisted corporations in streamlining various types of business processes using our SmartSign electronic signature and lifecycle management solutions.  SmartSign has a proven ROI, whether used for HR documents or negotiable instruments.  eOriginal is able to save your company time and money without compromising the legal integrity of your documents.

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After reading a recent article on EzineMark.com entitled “Better Electronic Signature Vendors and What They Should Be Practicing”, I wanted to expand on a few points regarding security, integration, and flexibility that were highlighted in the article.

At eOriginal our main focus is to provide our customers with the most flexible and innovative eSignature solutions on the market. In order to meet our customer’s needs we are always updating our products. As you can imagine quite a bit of planning and preparation goes into developing our product roadmap. So how do we begin to develop our roadmap? We solicit as much information as we can from our clients who play an active role in the development of our products.

What the above mentioned article did was to stress a few main points that are common for any company looking into eSignatures to consider. I want to highlight how we listened to our clients and the market to develop new and build upon existing features, to improve upon our solutions.

First and foremost are concerns about security. Often when moving to an electronic means of completing business, security concerns can make or break a deal. We realized this from the start and designed our application to be the most secure eSigning tool on the market with an infrastructure built on redundant hardware, above industry standard encryption, all in a SAS 70 Type II datacenter. We’ve even went above and beyond industry standard ID verification to help our customers in creating reasonable assurance that those who sign their documents electronically, are who they say they are. We do this through the availability of multi-layer signer authentication including eMail, security code, OFAC, and knowledge based questions. To outline all other security features would make for a post far too long.

With so much focus on cloud computing and the want and need for different applications to work seamlessly with each other it’s easy to understand why we built such an extensive library of web service calls for our clients. We talk with our clients to see what other systems they are utilizing to learn how we can be plugged into their workflows to improve operational efficiencies. One feature we recently developed, our “Push Service” allows organizations to automatically sync-up their business workflow processes.

With extensive security protocols and integration options already built in SmartSign Web. The flexibility of our electronic signature software allows us to automate business processes. SmartSign Web’s customization options allow organization to take the framework our application and build out a tool that can fit seamlessly into their existing business processes. By automating a few steps in the process our system really gives your business the ability to become more efficient and sustainable.

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