What’s New in Acrobat Sign: October 2025

Transcript

Hi there. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening here from London. Thank you all for joining for our latest release webinar that’s going to focus really on all the big new improvements that came in in our October 2025 release. We got a couple of agenda items to go through. So let me kick right off with a quick introduction here from the team. So Sussar, I’m going to be your presenter for today. I’m a Senior Product Manager for Acrobat Sign based out of London, mainly focusing around our customer-facing communication and also, we have Dafna and Andrea on the call. They’re going to be attending to any questions you might be having in our Q&A section. We’ll get into that, how that works and if this is your first time joining us, don’t worry. I’ll explain all the little bits. But yeah, Dafna has a big, big experience covering the Acrobat Sign user experiences and processing. And Andrea, who’s also been with Adobe for over 20 years, is really our expert all around trust and identity, compliance and security. So we have you covered for whatever questions might come up during today’s session. Please feel free to drop them in the Q&A part. On today’s agenda, the October release had a series of bigger and smaller features really pulled in. For this webinar, we’re going to be focusing on the highlights here. So first of all, I want to make sure you’re all fully aware about our upgraded user experiences. So this is one for request signatures, but also for designer experience. And then secondly, we’ve also been shipping an upgrade to a PDF support. So I’ll be covering that as well here in the first section. And the second part, we’ll be looking a bit at adjusting for preferences. Now this part here focuses more on some common misunderstandings and how to adjust Acrobat Sign in those cases. So I’ll be diving into a few bits here to help share some of these best practices. And then at the end, we’ll have about 15 minutes for Q&A. And how that works, right, since we’re expecting quite a few hundred attendees, we have disabled your microphone. That means we will please ask you to use the integrated Teams Q&A feature. You’ll see this on the top bar here. And what we’re going to do, we will review the most uploaded questions towards the end of the webinar. So if once you see the first questions come up here, and I’ll just grab my laser pointer, you’ll see this little feature here, which is basically the arrow upwards. This is how you vote for questions. So if you think this is a question you also share or you want to hear more about, please use the uploading feature next to the like button that helps us then kind of prioritize in our last section of the hour, which questions to talk about a little bit more. We will also kick off a few polls during the meeting just to learn more about you and keep this engaging. So yeah, let me kick off with the first one. And just to give this a try and get everyone comfortable with how that works.

All will appear basically right in front of your screen. And for the first one here, we are going to start with a very basic one. Let us know where you’re joining us from today.

We always try to pick a good time for most regions. Well, as you know, this is difficult. So it’s always very valuable for us to know where are you joining us from. I’ll have a quick look so we can all get accustomed. I see North America here leading the scene, but also quite a few from Europe and South America. This is your late afternoon evening. So thank you for joining us.

Glad you’re on board. Also Asia and Africa. Great to have you there. I think for Australia, it might be a little bit very early for them to join the call. So let’s see. Okay, great. In that case, let’s kick off and jump right into the content we got for you today. Since for some of you, this might be the first session. Let me start just by a quick overview of Adobe Acrobat Science product strategy really in our areas of focus. So first and foremost, Acrobat Science is Adobe’s global e-signature platform. And with this, we provide enterprises and organizations, but also SMBs with a solution that helps track requests and ensure that customers can collect e-signature securely and fast. And really what we’re striving for here as we make Acrobat Science better and better are really intelligent automation, robust integration and unparalleled e-signing experiences. So as we embark towards a new decade of AI and new things, we tend to focus around four key areas where we see the most value for our customers. The first one here in the top left is really all around effortless signing, sending and management of agreements. So this is where we make new features happen for senders, a better experience for signers or upgrade our admin features. So that’s the first bucket, what we like to bring in new things with every release. The second bucket here is all around compliance and trustworthiness. So as you can imagine, for an e-signature platform, probably one of the biggest and most important focus areas is making sure the solution is compliant with the laws that it’s required to. So with our global coverage here, there’s a whole set of different regulations that we need to keep track of, make sure we keep the compliance there. So this is where all this comes in. The third area then connecting people and the apps they use every day talks about are turnkey integrations. There are dozens of them out there which is to be configured and used by users. So if it’s Salesforce, Workday, SAP and many, many others, Microsoft Teams, for instance, these are all there simply to be connected between Acrobat Sign and those enterprise tools. And really where we see the value there is users can directly send or also track agreements right out of the systems they use every day. So we see a lot of very good impact there and definitely one area you should think about. The fourth and last area here, this is about automation. So this is twofold. On the one end, we have a very wide and powerful Acrobat Sign API that allows you to automate a lot of things by setting up custom integrations. But on the other hand, we also made with the leading low and no-code platforms like Microsoft Power Automate or Zapier. So this is where automation becomes a bit more easy and might not always require a developer. So this is where the citizen developer and this whole act around making easily configural configurations happen is located at. And obviously, we as Adobe want to help you automate things to become more efficient.

Good. In terms of our release schedule, right, where we currently are at, we’re released the last major release that we’re going to be talking about today. In October, we’re currently working very closely with the engineering to ship our next release in February. And then there will be another major release in May that we were looking forward to. Now, if you want to have a closer look at what we did across the last couple of months, especially this year, here’s just a bit of an overview slide. I’m not going to be covering all of this today, but we have an excellent Acrobat Sign release notes section where you can scroll and read all about what we’ve done this year and in every single release. So make sure that to check that one out, because that will give you a lot of insight and detailed information about how certain areas are used and covered in Acrobat Sign. Good. With that being said, let’s jump right into the first section. As announced here, we want to talk about all the user experience that we’ve covered in the experience and also the upgrade support for PDF. Okay, starting with the requesting signatures with ease. This year really is talking about minimizing friction in the experience that we’ve been working on. Comes in two different things here on this slide. And there are a couple of more points that I’ll share in the following slide. I’ll share with you this quick demo where you’ll see, and I’ll just stop that right here, two things. The first one, which is a new point in the user experience, is this new breakout of the different types of participants that can be added to the signing flow. Before there was just one plus button, which then broke down into a dropdown where you selected the different individuals. We now brought all this forward to the top navigation. That means with a single click and not two clicks and selecting, you can directly add whatever participant you like to add, if yourself or here the CC action. All of these are right available out of the top navigation, removing the click from the experience.

The second part you see in this demo is around our authoring step. This is this experience where the document is then loaded and you can interact with the different form fields, place them on the document before sending it out. Here, our big improvement really is around exposing all the features. In this case, what was enabled on the admin side of things were the normal e-signature field and the signature block. For those of you using digital signatures, if digital signatures is enabled, it will also appear here. But further than that, it really just brings up the choice of picking the right signature field to the top level. That’s what you’ll see here in a second right there. Before the October release, if you haven’t played around with this before, there was only the e-signature field and pretty much users had to right click and then select the right sub-signature type. That’s the big change here in terms of the user experience, trying to make things a bit easier to find and also easier to connect when you’re sending a lot of documents.

Now, the thing that we’ve upgraded here is around pasting a list of recipients.

So this is really interesting, right? Because sometimes you might just want to stand on an agreement and you have all the different recipients ready in a kind of list. Maybe it’s an Excel list, where you’re picking it from. Since the October release, you’re now able to simply paste that list of recipients using Ctrl-V to set all of them up. So here in this case, you’ll see I copied the user one until user three example, comma separated into the first recipient. And by pasting it, it’s automatically separated into three different recipients. So avoiding the need to kind of take each of one by one and copy them in there. So it’s just a little thing for speed and efficiency to make things easier for all the users out there.

Another one upgrade that we’ve done here is, again, around speed and efficiency, but also around preferences. The new user experience for the send page has done one major thing. It turned around the kind of flow a user would normally go through the setting up an agreement to send it out. Because if you kind of know our old experience, what we call classic experience, where we asked the user first to fill in all the participants before uploading a field going from the top down navigation, we flipped this around to first upload a file and then complete the recipient data and details. So what’s happened is when we flipped this around, we made a change to basically hide all the different aspects so that really the user on the send page had no choice but to first upload the document.

And what we’ve done now here in October is basically introduce a setting to avoid that behavior. So your group admins or administrators can now select to check or uncheck this little setting, which will basically control if all the other fields are hidden or shown to the user, no matter if they uploaded the document or not. So that’s a little, I would say, preference setting that keeps the experience a bit more flexible and accommodates any preferences your users might have. Good. Let’s jump one forward to now the recipient experience, also called signer experience. There are two things that were introduced here in the October release. One, the new signer experience now also supports limited document visibility.

This is a feature and maybe if some of you are not aware of what that feature does, please let us know in the Q&A bar and we can dive into that maybe in the Q&A section. But for all of you aware of this, in very short, it allows you to hide one document from a certain set of recipients to keep the document internal and external separated so that externals might only see a subpar of the documents attached to the agreement. Now, what we’ve done here is basically now being able to support this in the new signer experience that has a lot of benefits over what we call the classic experience. So that’s one upgrade here, making sure that we have parity for limited document visibility. Second of all, we’ve upgraded the way we allow users to navigate through the signature fields and sorry, not just the signature fields, but actually all the form fields on the document. And to be a bit more specific, right, with the new signer experience, how we launched it was we basically launched this new blue bar that you see up there that counts on all the different required fields that are remaining for the user. Now, what that does is it gives clear guidance in terms of how the user should be interacting with the document and how many fields are really left there to fill in. It focuses on required fields because these are the ones that the user actually has to fill in. We’re trying to make this as fast as possible for the signer, of course. But in some cases, actually what our customer told us is, no, we do want them to navigate through all the different fields, although they might not be required. So what you see here in the top experience is how it works when we’re only navigating through required fields. Now, you might think this is not such a problem in this case because everything is on the same page. But if you have a 60-page document and maybe the only required fields are on page one and 59, then there are lots of optional fields in the middle, then this starts becoming a bit challenging and might not bring in the results you’re looking for. So that’s why we introduced a new setting again for admins to control and configure as needed that flips this behavior and basically then will force the user to click through all the available fields. And that you see here in motion.

A few more clicks, but in that way, we’re making sure the user is actually navigating through all the different fields and not jumping over them. So for all of you who might have had such challenges or looking to resolve this, just know there is now a setting under signature preferences to resolve this. Great. Let me jump to the next one. And this one is actually a very new feature that came in what we call group checkboxes here. Now, in the October 25 release, we made this feature available via API. So you won’t be able to basically set it up using the UI and going from the send page to the authoring page just yet. This is planned for the following release in February, so stay tuned on that. But nevertheless, I wanted to make sure I give you a bit of an overview of how that looks from the signer perspective. So really the use case here is the sender aims to provide clear instructions for signers on how to interact with a group of checkboxes where, for example, two out of five need to be checked. And in this short demo, we’ll see how that works. So what you see here is a few different groups of checkboxes, each kind of grouped together one by one. And you see here in red, and I hope that’s coming up nice and big enough on your screen, that for the first set, these first three of checkboxes, it requires the signer to select two out of the three options. If they don’t do that, then they will not be able to move forward and complete the experience. And the same kind of goes along for the other field. So we’ll see how the user now navigates through the experience.

This is exactly where you see that behavior come along. Now, the same happens when the user clicks one too many. So you see again this kind of red highlighted tool tip saying, oh, you cannot select more than one option here, otherwise we won’t let you move forward. So it clearly indicates that. And even if the user then tries to go ahead, it would not let the user go ahead. So this is really to help make sure users understand what’s expected of them in forms like these and make things happen. Okay, let’s move on to the PDFA. If you’ve been on the last webinar around PDFA, then you’ve probably heard about this already, but let me just give a quick resume of that. PDFA is a PDF type for long-term archiving. But really the objective of PDFA was to ensure that agreements can be viewed the same way in 10, 20, or 100 years, regardless of what software or operating system is around. And really big use cases where we see PDFA being used is government, financial regulators, or insurance. And that always depends a bit on the region and regulations that come in. But PDFA is a PDF standard that’s been around for a while. It’s used in certain circumstances and is really a format focused on that long-term availability and archiving of documents. And whilst you might not need this at this point in time, we do see, especially in Europe, more and more regulations kicking in to asking for this whenever any documents need to be handed over to, let’s say, financial regulators. So it’s really our way to opening up and embracing that change and allowing you to conform to it. And really what we’ve done here, then the first phase of the rollout in July 2025, we’ve introduced a new PDFA workflow feature that allowed users to accept, validate, and maintain documents in PDFA2B. So what that means is they were able to upload documents, especially the only PDFA2B format files, to Acrobat Sign. And we maintained that document format throughout the signature flow so that the document that comes out of it fully signed is also PDFA2B. Now, what’s new in October, we’ve added a lot more flexibility and ease of use for it because sometimes users might need to create PDFA2B signed documents, but they don’t have any way to convert their Word file to do to PDFA file first. So it kind of brings up barriers there in the process. And here in the October release, we tried to remove all those barriers that we’ve seen to use the feature.

So what we’ve expanded it to now is one, we’re converting any supported file types from Acrobat Sign, right? There’s a whole list of them, like Word files in PowerPoint, pictures. So we’ve taken care of the conversion to PDFA. And we’ve also expanded the supported file types to not just PDFA2B, but also 3B. So these are two different standards, right? 3B is the newer one, but there’s still heavy usage of 2B. So the administrators can basically select to which kind of level of PDFA users agreements will be converted to. So that’s really the background here. Maybe one last thing, also the audit report that comes along with the agreement will be converted to the PDFA format. And with that, you have a whole flow of documents, all nicely tied together, that come out in the PDFA format and can then be handed over to any institution that might ask for it in this format. So if you’re looking for this as an admin or group admin, you’ll find this under the global settings can be enabled on an account or group level. So wherever you have use cases, I think our recommended way to approach this is to say, hey, I’m creating group. This group is specifically for PDFA workflows and any users that require this feature, this functionality for their use cases is added to this user group as an additional group. So whenever they try to send a document, they can select from which group and hence they select which kind of configuration has been taken into account. And with that, you’ll be on the safe side to make sure your users can go out there and collect signatures in the PDFA format. Great. With that first part being done, let us start quickly a second poll, just to get a bit more insight from you. I’ll just be switching here to my screen to start that poll.

And we’ll take a couple of minutes.

Here. And in this poll, this is really an open question to you. What is the most relevant upgrade for you from our first part of the webinar? So let us know from all the little things I’ve just shown. What’s top of mind and we’ll kind of keep track there just a little bit.

Okay. Wonderful. I see a couple of responses come in there.

Okay. I think we’ll keep going. I also see there’s lots of questions. Bear with our team busy replying. We’ll get there. Okay. Wonderful. Let’s jump to the second part of our webinar. So, well, Acrobat Sign is a global solution for electronic signature, but it’s important to understand that every country in the world may have different requirements, legal requirements, and also different ways to define electronic signatures.

For example, in Europe, the EIDAS regulation defines very strict rules for three different types of signature, like simple signature, advanced signature, qualified signature, but other countries in the world that have exactly the same approach with maybe different names, different policies, different regulation. So it’s very important before you use a software like Acrobat Sign that you fully understand the legal context, not only for your country, but also for the country of your recipients. That’s also why a product like Acrobat Sign supports different type of signatures. And you have heard Jonas talking about digital signatures. These are definitely the most secure and compliant form of electronic signature, but it doesn’t mean that necessarily you have to support digital signature to have a secure electronic signature. In fact, the level of authentication that can be applied to a simple signature may elevate it to a level that’s absolutely enough for your business. So looking at the different type of signature, we can see a growing level of robustness in compliance, but also an additional level of friction for the user. So we have to carefully navigate on these capabilities.

So one point that is important is also the validation of electronic signature. We mostly sometimes focus on the creation of signature, electronic or digital, but well, we needed to understand that a signature is as valid as the capacity to be verified from any relying party receiving the signed document. So a signature created in Acrobat Sign, you can have three levels of security that I want to quickly explain. So the first level is the signature itself. So it can be electronic or digital. When it’s digital, we have the digital certificates that authenticate the user. Then we have timestamps that introduce the proof of existence of the signature. So we can have a simple timestamp generated by the Adobe servers, but we can also have the cryptographic timestamp, which provides a secure evidence to prove that a signature was applied on a certain date and time. And finally, electronic seals that provide a proof of integrity and a seal of integrity, in fact. And that’s what typically you have in this blue bar on top of the PDF documents generated in Acrobat Sign. And by default, Adobe Acrobat provides this level of seal coverage. So in the last release, we have added the option to remove the integrity seal. And I hope you can see the quick demo on screen. And the Swiss example is a good example of a signature compliance that is based on strict policies that needed to be met in order to obtain a good result. So if you can see here, when you typically upload a general file generated in Acrobat Sign, you may get disappointing results. And the reason is that the seal applied by Adobe to any Acrobat Sign field is not considered as valid, even if in fact it is a security mechanism. So in this feature, we have created the optional ability to replace the seal with a fingerprint that will show up in the audit report, which will give a full green check into the Swiss validator. As you can see at the end of the audit report, when this feature is enabled, we have a fingerprint that provides a unique digest of the document that can be easily verified by submitting the file and calculating the fingerprint again. So if the value matches the value in the audit report, then you can be secure that the document has not been tampered or verified since it was created. Okay, I’m going back the floor to Jonas, if you want, or well, I can maybe just complete with this slide. So, yeah, we have an additional option for Swiss compliance that are listed here. So we can provide a full configuration to customers that are interested in the compliance with Swiss ZRTS low, which includes the configuration of a timestamp and also the option to avoid attaching the audit report to the document, which will also fail to be compliant with the Swiss validator.

Okay, Jonas, are you able to take over? Yes, I am back and I hope you can hear and see me again. Sorry for the technical hiccup. I think I got an office update right in the middle of the webinar. So appreciate your patience here and thanks for staying on. With this slide here, really, I think there’s just one message. In October, we’ve started a new in-product banner. That’s the one you see here as what’s new. And really the attention here is to give you regular updates around webinars, new tutorials or blogs that we have out there. So just a call to say, hey, keep a look out of this. We’ll keep updating it with new content as it comes along and should help you stay up to date with everything happening in Acrobat Sign.

Okay.

And, Drea, if you could move one further. Yeah, I think we got one last poll for you here, and then we’ll jump right into Q&A.

And this one, for me personally, is actually the most interesting poll I’d love to hear you from you about because this webinar series is focused around our leases, but we’re actually planning to do a lot more webinars. So we’re very open to any suggestions, as you might say. We have lots of topics on our list, but it’s always best to hear from our customers and users out there. What’s of interest to you? What would you like to hear about next? Try and be as detailed as possible and we can see where we can plan for here for the next year. Okay. I already see a good few things coming up around tips and tricks, web forms, signatures. I assume that is around the different types of signatures, workflows, templates, routing, multiple signatures. Yeah. Physical signatures. And I saw a question actually here in the Q&A bar around how to combine physical signatures and electronic signatures in Acrobat Sign. I think we can go around that. That’s great. Please keep it coming. I see we have 74 responses. I know a lot more on this call. We will look at this also after our event to help us plan for next year. Already got a big list, but obviously whatever comes out on top here will go to the top of the list pretty much. Okay. Workflows is the leader at the moment, so I’ll let this run as we start getting into Q&A.

Okay. Great. Let me sort the questions here by the most uploaded. Let’s see.

And I’m going to ignore the one that says I froze. The screen didn’t change. Let me archive this one.

Okay. Great. So I think the first question we have here is from Jessica. Are there any plans to have the option to allow an edit on a completed form? For example, the signer made an error and we would like to allow them to edit without starting all over again. And as Daphna pointed out, we actually have a feature that we released not so long ago. It’s called restart agreement.

And this will allow you to restart the whole agreement from that point of view so they can actually correct it. So there’s a feature for you out there. It might just need to be enabled by your administrator. I think that’s the only thing to check. And if we can, let me try and there’s something out there to help you in this case.

If you haven’t uploaded yet, this is the moment. So let me jump to the second one. What is the difference between the e-signature field and the signature block? I think the main thing is the simple e-signature field is resizable. So you can adjust it in size as you go along. And it generally holds less information about the signer. So a signature block kind of always holds a set of information that’s defined and it can be to a level customizable. Whereas the e-signature field is really the quick to go thing to do. So especially in some industries like pharma, we see a lot of use of the signature block to highlight so depending on your use case might be a good choice.

All right, next one. Can several people sign in any order and then have one person designated to sign last? Yes, that is what we call parallel and hybrid signing. So you can set this up in the tutorial videos out there to help you out. If not, feel free to reach out and we’ll get you sorted.

Next question here with six uploads. Is it possible to download a template written in Adobe Sign so that it can be used as a PDF with fillable form fields? Yeah, short answer list is not supported. And the reason being, right, once you have that document out there in Acrobat Sign, we attach certain attributes for it so we cannot just be supported as such and downloaded to PDF.

So I’m afraid that’s a no here in this case.

Let me update just a second to see if we have any new runner-ups.

No, I think I’ll go ahead with the next one. Any plans to update workflows to offer conditional routing logic? If then rules that can automatically alter the document pass based on a form field value. So I think this here speaks more about like certain documents that you might be sending for signature with form fields that say there is a field in that it says contract value that’s filled in by the first or second signer. And depending on that, you’d like this document to go a different signing route. Yeah, as Dafna highlighted here, the best way currently to support it is through integrating with Power Automate. So kind of building those more advanced workflows. Just with Acrobat Sign itself, you’ll find you come to some limits there. So that’s our recommendation here in this case.

Is it possible to have four signers with document where the first three can sign in the order and then, okay, I think that’s a duplicate with what I said before. Yes, hybrid routing supported and you can do that.

Yes, we will share the recording. I also see that.

Sorry, I’m just scrolling through all the questions with screen froze. Bear with me a second.

All right. What’s the best way to combine a signed document with another document without getting an error message? Sometimes I print it to Microsoft PDF, but sometimes it doesn’t work.

So that’s actually a pretty good question because you’ll find you’re going to come to some sort of roadblock because we, as explained earlier, we’re blocking and sealing the document by default, right with an electronic seal. So any attempts to combine it in a way that would alter the document are blocked, prevented. So you get that error message. I think the best way and here I’ll probably need to double check also with my technical colleagues, but the way we do it in some instances would be a PDF portfolio where you can kind of keep the signed document as an original without changing it and just have a second document as part of the portfolio.

Let’s go to the next one. Anything in the works to retain original file names after a sign when multiple files sent together.

Right. I think that Daphna responded here. We currently don’t have it in the works, but as you can imagine, we were also taking this in for our understanding of future prioritization. So we’ll consider it and review it as part of our global review around new things to come into Acrobat Sign. Let me take one last one here to make sure I pick a good one.

Yeah, here we go. I need to send a document for a client to complete the form and then sign it. Is it possible to configure it so that the client can choose to fill out the form digitally or alternatively print it, complete it manually, sign it by hand and upload it again so that we can maintain traceability? So that is a setting in the administrator panel that allows you to upload a copy or a physical copy, basically a scan of the physical copy of the document in the workflow. So you as the sender, once you obtain the physical copy, could upload it to the document. With that, move it forward. So that is something Acrobat Sign supports if configured correctly. So again, this is a bit up to your configuration. Make sure you review that with any administrator you have sitting around. And if you do need help, our Acrobat Sign support team are there to help you out.

Okay. That being said, I think we’re at time. Thank you all for joining us today. It’s great having you here on the call and getting the insights from you has been phenomenal. Again, apologies for the technical hiccup, but I hope you still found it interesting. And certainly the results will be based on all of your responses. So thank you so much and have a great evening or a great day, depending on where you are.