Gather high-volume documents using GigaSign

The GigaSign app allows you to send, collect, and track documents for signature to thousands of people at the same time. It’s designed for high volume communications from employees and customers. It leverages the Adobe Sign API, provides the exact same functionality as Megasign, but includes additional support from multiple signers, recipient groups, recipient roles, agreement names, carbon copy, and much more. Here’s a look at GigaSign. It’s a standalone application that runs on the computer of the person doing the send. It allows you to send agreements in bulk to multiple recipient groups using complex workflows, such as those with passwords or different roles. GigaSign uses an integration key that’s gathered from your Adobe Sign account in order to enable access. It also uses the email address of the person that created that key. And if you’re an Adobe Sign administrator, you can act as other people. For instance, you can act on behalf of the HR department one day and accounting on another, simply by entering the email of the person you’d like to be, and you’ll send as that person. But by default, it will use the email of the person who created the key. Now GigaSign uses a CSV, comma separated value file, that can be created in Excel to determine who’s being sent to and what workflow to use. So let’s go ahead and take a look at this. It’s similar to GigaSign, but with some key differences in order to support the larger volume. Each row is an agreement, and each column is some data for that agreement. So in column A, this is the workflow or the order in which the recipients are going to be receiving the agreements. For example, in row 2, it’s a single email, so this is just going to one recipient. In row 3, the agreement is going to multiple signers. You separate the signers by using a comma. Row 4 is a little more complicated. First the agreement is going to example, example.com, and then it’s going to 2 and 3 at the same time, and either can sign a signer too. This is an example of a signing group. In row 5, this is going to a role-based signer. In Adobe Sign, we have roles such as form filler and approver, and these are denoted by adding square brackets here at the end and adding the number of the role. Role numbers are denoted in the documentation, and in this case, the number 2 is an approver. In row 6, this is a password example, and this one is going to one person to sign, but they must enter a password to open the file before they can sign. This password is at the Adobe Sign level and not the document level. Now moving on to column B, this is the message that the person will receive when signing. They’ll see this in the body of the email, and it also appears as a dropdown in the top right when they’re signing an agreement. Column C is the agreement name, and we highly recommend using a unique name here because it shows up in your account as the agreement name that’s gone out for signature, and you can also search on it. So unique names will make it much easier to identify. It doesn’t have to be unique, and you also don’t need to enter a name. If you don’t enter a name, it’ll just use the file name of the document that you’re sending out for signature. Every column past column A is optional, but we recommend filling out column C. Column D is the CC list, so if you’d like people to get emails all along the way when a document’s been sent and signed, you can put their email address here. You can add up to 13 additional email addresses by using a comma between them. Column E is the reminder frequency. Set this if you’d like the recipients to receive reminders to sign their agreement on a daily, weekly, every other day, every third day, or fifth day cadence. They’ll receive notifications until they’ve signed it. Column F is the expiration time. If you’d like your agreement to expire in a certain time frame, you can enter that here, and the agreement will expire then. Beyond column F, we have merge fields, and these are things like name, address, phone number that you merge into a document. You simply set the field name from the document to the name of the column header here. In this example, the field name would be address, and it will merge the data into the document. Be aware that it’s case sensitive and that we recommend that you do a test sample using just one row to make sure everything’s merging as expected before you do your main send. Now that the CSV file is all set up, let’s move over to the main application. There are three blue buttons in the app. There’s a browse button on the left, right, and send button at the bottom. The left button is who you want to send to. You’ll get a prompt to open our CSV file. In this case, it’s going to go to these four people for signature. On the right, you tell it what to send, and you can choose a local file from your computer or from the Adobe Sign Library. We’ll select library, and it shows all my library templates. I’ll select the test template, and if you want to send multiple documents, simply select the other agreements that you want added. Each one you click will be an additional document in your send, and whatever order you click them in is the order that people will see them in. So in this case, test will be page one, and test two will be page two. Let’s go ahead and send this out for signature, but before we do, there’s one other option, parallel sign. If we turn this on, there’s no signing order, meaning that everyone receives the agreement at the same time. For example, on row two, there are three signers, and all three signers will receive the agreement at the same time. And remember, this is per row, so if you have five people on a row and you turn this on, all five people receive the agreement at the same time. The order of their signature doesn’t matter. If you leave it off, then signer one would need to sign it before signer two. Off is the normal way that most people send, but if you have an agreement that’s going out to five managers to sign, and the order doesn’t really matter, turn this on and you receive your signatures a lot faster. Once everything is ready, press send, and you just sent the agreements out for signature via the API. Now all agreements that are sent appear on the manage page in Adobe Sign, so you can run reports and manage in the usual manner. You can see the progress on the agreement we just sent, and if you select it on the right, you can open it to send a reminder, cancel, or even download. You can change the recipients, anything that you would normally be able to do with an agreement. However, GigaSign is designed for bulk sending. You might have thousands of agreements here, and changing each one on the manage page can be time consuming and difficult. So GigaSign does have management options as well in the top left. When you click here, you can see the agreements that we just sent out for signature. Now this is not a live view, and if you want to see what’s happening right now, you just need to right click and select update status. This will ask the API what’s happening with those agreements. It looks to see if they’ve been sent out for signature, and once they’re out for signature, we can do additional things. It shows the status for all agreements, and here you’ll notice that these agreements have bounced because example.com isn’t a real email address. But if it was, it would have additional information here, like the current status, and whether or not it’s been signed. There’s some other things you can do from this page as well. If you right click and select view as report, you’ll see a list of all the agreements that are out for signature and their current status. You can see things like viewed, signed, and any other statuses. If you right click, you can also download the report as a CSV file that can be opened in Excel, and you can run formulas on it. When agreements are signed, there are additional columns in the report with all those additional fields like the name and address. You can also download the sound agreements if you’d like to see the actual agreement that has been signed. And when you right click, it puts the agreement into a local folder, and it uses a name that it had when the agreement was sent out for signature for the file name. In settings, there is a button to include the unsigned agreements as well. If we turn this on, it also downloads the unsigned version of the agreement. You can also set a reminder if you forgot to set this when you sent the agreements for signature, and you can also send a one-off reminder here to anyone who hasn’t signed yet. Rename allows you to rename this send. We’ll go ahead and rename it to test so we can distinguish between the two. You can also cancel, which will cancel this entire send, and we can also delete, which will remove it from the list entirely. Additionally in sendings, we have some other options. There is a post redirect URL if you’d like the signer to be redirected to a page after signing, and this might be an FAQ, frequently asked questions page, or some other home page. You enter that URL here, and they’ll be redirected to that page as soon as they sign. Below we have some other options. We have locale, which you can change the language of the outgoing email, maybe to Spanish or some other language. When you select this, the agreement goes out for a signature in that language, but it doesn’t change the language of the actual document, just the email and system generated messages associated with that agreement. There are some advanced settings also shown in the documentation, such as file per row mode and including a signing link in the reporting. You can also have an audit trail in the downloads, so your downloads will also include audit trail information. We have extensive documentation that’s included with the download as well as some troubleshooting steps. And if you have any questions or need help with GigaSign, simply email gigasign at adobe.com and someone will answer your question. Thanks for taking the time to learn about GigaSign, our high volume sending tool that leverages the Adobe Sign API.