Up & running for Acrobat Sign administrators

Get up and running quickly with Acrobat Sign by focusing on these seven key areas, creating an external archive, setting up branding for your account, security, send settings, adding users and groups, reports, and templates. Let’s start by taking a look at setting up an archive.

Just like backing up your computer, you should keep a backup of all your Sign agreements in one location. To do this, select on the account tab, which you’ll see as an administrator, and then select external archive. Here you can send a copy of all agreements to a specific email, box, or Evernote account.

Next, branding your account will add a level of professionalism and confidence to the signature experience. Here underneath account setup, you can add your company name, a host name, and your logo.

I’ll go ahead and add my logo here, and then save the settings.

With your logo handy, simply pop down to the email settings, and add your logo there, as well. Branding can be set globally or at the group level, which means each department within your company can have their own unique branding if they choose.

Next up is security, a top priority for all organizations. You should spend some time here reviewing the settings in this section in detail to decide what works best for your organization. You can set single sign-on settings, password policies, login password strength, PDF encryption type, this is the type of encryption applied to the document after all the signatures have been gathered, ensuring that the final document can be opened, but not edited. The recommended option is 128 bit AES.

You can also set the agreement signing and document password strength, link expirations, and client certificate for web hooks and callbacks.

The next area to focus on are the send settings. In general it’s best to reduce the number of options for the sender. You can also create message templates for consistency in the email messages that everyone sends.

Further down, you can choose to allow individual signers to send reminders, and in certain cases you may want to expire or cancel documents that aren’t signed after certain number of days. I’ll go ahead and set this to 14 days. Remember that once an agreement has expired, it cannot be restarted or retrieved.

Next, add your users and groups. Specific users are generally added to an account, because they will either be sending out agreements, or they might be a group or account level admin. Users that will only be signing agreements don’t need to be added, unless you want to control exactly how they sign with account level settings. Groups allow you to set specific settings for the individuals inside that group. For example, your sales team can brand and use Acrobat Sign differently than your accounting department.

Building reports allow you to gain visibility into your document signing process, and learn how individual groups or users are doing. It’s also a great way to show the return on investment you have with Acrobat Sign.

Now for consistency and revision control, document templates should be created and stored in the library. To create a template, select create reusable template from the homepage. There are two types of library templates, document templates, and form filled layer templates. As a best practice, a single user should be designated as a document administrator, someone who is responsible for creating and maintaining the templates. Creating a specific document admin user eliminates confusion on who manages templates within the library. We also recommend using a distribution list for the document administrator ID. This will allow you to control who has access to this document admin login, while at the same time, allowing the responsibility to be shared. And there you have the seven key areas to focus on to get up and running quickly with Acrobat Sign. -