Manage Agreements: Get Real-Time Visibility into Agreement Status

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to this edition of Acrobat Sign Skill Builder. Before we jump in, I’d like to remind you that this session is being recorded and will be available within 24 hours, right here where you joined today. You’ll also receive an email with a link to the recording for on-demand viewing. As always, please make sure to ask any questions in the Q&A pod on the right side of the screen. We’ll have Adobe experts on standby ready to answer. We’ll answer as many questions as possible, but for those that we aren’t able to get to, there are several great resources that you can visit to learn more. We’ve dropped those in the Q&A pod for you to bookmark. (upbeat music) My name is Weston Romero, Technical Product Evangelist at Adobe. Over the course of the last several years, I’ve had the pleasure of helping a broad range of customers, all in pursuit of digitally transforming their document and signature workflows with Adobe Solutions and Partner ecosystem. I look forward to helping you as well, and I appreciate you being here with me today. That said, enough about me, let’s talk about what we’ll be covering today in more detail. We’ll start by jumping right into the Acrobat Sign manage page and help you understand how to view your agreements by status. Then, we’ll show you how you can take additional action on agreements after they’ve been sent out for signature, and how to view and share your Sign PDFs when completed.

From there, we’ll show you how to use the filter and search function to find specific agreements, as well as exporting your web form and bulk send data.

Last but not least, we’ll take managing your agreements to mobile, and show you how to manage like a pro even while on the go. I like to start out with an easy poll. What is your experience level with Adobe Acrobat Sign? Okay, let’s start with the agreement statuses. We’re logged into the Acrobat Sign User Interface, where we’ll be spending most of our time on the Manage page. We can get to the Manage page, one or two ways. We can either select Manage from the tabs across the top, or we can select Manage and track all agreements from the list of actions. Both methods getting us to the same place where we’ll have the needed functionality to successfully manage and track our Acrobat Sign agreements. On the Manage page, we’ll bring your attention to the statuses on the left, and starting from the top we’ll start with in progress.

The In progress section will show us any agreements that are outstanding and awaiting required action from others before the agreement is considered complete. Later on, we’re going to double click into some of the agreements and show you the actions you’re able to take as well as the additional visibility you have. Waiting for you is where you’ll be able to access all of the Acrobat Sign agreements that are awaiting action from you. Whether you need to sign, approve, or even delegate, you can access the section as a personal cue that you can rely on to show you any actions awaiting your responses on Acrobat Sign agreements. The completed section is where we’ll see all of our Acrobat Sign agreements that have been completed, meaning all required parties have taken the necessary action on the documents in order for the transaction to be considered complete. Here, we can access and view the completed PDF, including the supporting audit report and its exportable data. The canceled section is where we’ll see any agreement that either we have canceled ourselves as the initiating user or a participant has canceled by declining to participate with the agreement. Doing so we’ll automatically place the agreement in a canceled state, while informing the center that the agreement has been declined. Like the Canceled section, the Expired section is where we’ll see any agreement that has been canceled, but due to expire. Initiating users are able to specify the amount of days before an agreement will expire. And once it has, the user will be notified and the agreement will then be accessible from this section for later reference. And then finally, we have agreements that are in a draft state, which is anything that we went to send out, but close out of prematurely, making it easy to start where we left off without having to start all over. On top of agreement statuses, we can access templates, web forms, and bulk sends from this page as well.

With templates, we can make edits to existing templates that we’ve created. Web forms, we can access and make edits to them as well as access to the URL or HTML script that we might embed the form with on our website. And with bulk sends, we can manage them directly from this view, giving us the ability to manage agreements that we’ve sent in bulk in a consolidated space. We’ll be touching on managing web forms in bulk sends a bit later when we walk you through exporting data from these agreement types. Okay, we covered where to view your agreements by status. Let’s now spend some time going over how you can further manage and track your agreements. Let’s start by double clicking into an agreement or two that are in progress. Back in this section, we can see the agreements that are in progress with some high level details that show us the recipients involved, the agreement title, status, and date the agreement was modified. As we hover over the agreements, we have quick access to opening the agreement or sending a reminder. If we click on one of these agreements, we see additional detail and options that are available to us. We see the date of the agreement that was created, the status, initiating group, and even the message that was sent to the participants. Below that we have a set of actions available to us, such as opening the agreement and sending a reminder, which were the two actions we had available when hovering over the agreement. On top of that, we have quite a few additional options that are available to us to really take action on these agreements. Let’s click on Open agreement. And what you’ll see that does for us is give us a real-time view of the document in its current state, while continuing to show us all of the additional actions that are available to us. Starting with reminders, reminders allow us to send a friendly nudge to the participants involved, reminding them that they’re up to participate and complete their part of the Acrobat Sign agreement, whether they’re signing, approving, or delegating. We can set the reminder frequency to be daily, weekly, or every business day, every other day, third or fifth day until they’ve completed their part. We can also set a specific date that we’d like the reminder to be sent out on, or can send the reminder right now. On top of the participants needing to take action, we can even remind ourselves. Optionally, we can include a message for the participants involved, letting them know why they’re receiving this reminder. Let’s select Create, and now we’ve sent a reminder to our signing participant. If we click back into Reminders, we can see our original reminder details and can access all of the same options to send another. The Cancel section allows us to cancel any of our agreements in progress, should we need to stop the process for whatever reason. We can also include a note or a reason for canceling for reference later. And then of course notify any involved participants that the agreement has been canceled. Downloading the PDF and audit report allows us to view the tamper-proof PDF of these documents should we need to do so. However, because the agreement is in progress, the status of the agreement on the audit report will also reflect this. So anyone viewing it knows that the agreement they’re viewing is incomplete and awaiting actions by others. Hiding the agreement will hide it from our view on the manage page, however, it will not delete it. You can still access the hidden agreement by using the advanced search function, which we’ll be going over a bit later. Sharing the agreement allows us to let others view and access to the agreement in its current state. Perhaps our manager is asking for a status on an important contract that’s partially complete, we could share the agreement with them so that they can see exactly where it’s at. We would just simply enter in their email address and a message for them so they know why the agreement is being shared with them. Notes allows us the ability to add a personal note on the agreement that we might refer back to later for additional context. I’ll add a note myself, save it, and you’ll see that when I return, I’ll be able to see the note, and could add additional details if needed. We can also download individual files, form field data, or upload a copy of the signed agreement if someone happened to wet sign the document, and we wanted to keep it attached to the Acrobat Sign Transaction. Uploading the signed document will then identify it as completed. In the recipient section, we are able to see all of the participants who are involved showing us if they completed their part, or if the action is still awaiting their participation. If we hover over the participant, we’ll see additional detail, such as the participants role and the type of authentication required. If the participant hasn’t yet taken action, we can add an alternate recipient or adjust the type of authentication required to view and complete the document. The last thing we see in this view is the activity, which shows us a sequence of events that have taken place so far. We can see the event where the agreement was created by the user, and can also see that it was signed by the first participant and then sent the next participant for their signature. These details are similar to the ones that we see on the audit report, but accessible from a manage page for a high-level view of the journey the agreement has been on so far. Okay, we just looked at how to manage and track your agreements that are in progress, but what about agreements that are waiting for you to take action on? Let’s take a look.

The Waiting for you section is where we will see a consolidated view of Acrobat Sign Agreements that are awaiting action on our part. As I mentioned, when summarizing this section earlier, this acts as a consolidated cue that you can use to manage, view, and complete your agreements without leaving the interface. By default, Acrobat Sign sends an email to a participant, letting them know they’re required to take action. But if the participant has an Acrobat Sign account, they can see everything they need to from this view. We see here we have two agreements that are awaiting action. So let’s click on one of these and take a look at our options, just like for agreements in progress from the right hand pane, we have additional visibility as well as actions and activity details. In this case, we want to go ahead and sign the document. Selecting view and sign will take us to the document within the same browser, allowing us to view the document in its entirety while completing any required form and signature fields. Selecting Click to sign will complete the process and return us back to Acrobat Sign. You now know where to view agreements by status, how to take action on agreements in progress, as well as viewing Sign agreements that are waiting for you. Let’s now look at agreements that have been completed and the options that are available to us to view and share with others. Taking a closer look at the completed section, shows us where Acrobat Sign agreements are made accessible once all required participants have signed off on them. In this view, we immediately see details that show us the recipients that were involved, the initiating user, the title of the agreement and the data was modified. Hovering over the agreements show us two quick actions available to us that would allow us to either open the agreement in Acrobat Sign or download the PDF. Clicking on the agreement itself will show us the right hand pane, similar to the other sections. And if we select Open agreement, this will show us a view that allows us to review the document while having additional actions available to us in this view. In the top right hand corner, we see high-level details regarding this agreement. Below that we see the actions available to us to take on this a completed agreement, such as download the PDF and audit report, which will provide us with the fully signed and certified PDF of the signed document and audit log. We could download the form field data for this agreement in an Excel document, or hide the agreement from our view on the manage page. We can also share the completed PDF with someone directly from this view, which would allow us to enter in the email address of the participant and a message that lets us know why they’re receiving a copy of the signed document. Finally, we could send a reminder and add a note, similar to what we walked you through for agreements in progress. The recipient section provides us insights on the participants involved, their role, and the order in which they participated with the agreement. Finally, the Activity section shows us a view of the sequence of events that took place for this completed agreement, providing us with details that are also captured on the audit report. Okay, we viewed the agreements by status, and then double clicked into the actions and additional insights that you have for in progress and completed Acrobat Sign Agreements. But what if we knew exactly the agreement we were looking for and wanted to search by the name of the document, signer, or even the form field data that was collected in the document during signing, such as company name or address? On the Manage page, you’ll see at the top that you have filters and a search function to filter by and search for specific agreements. Starting with filters, you can narrow down your search by filtering, by modified date, providing us with a list of options or the ability to define our own custom date range. We can also filter by groups. So if I’m using the multiple groups function in Acrobat Sign, I might be sending agreements for more than one group, which would allow me to narrow down my search by the varying groups I may have sent from. I also have the ability to display hidden content. So if I use the hide action to hide certain agreements from the view in my manage page, I would be able to include those hidden agreements in my search. If we select Apply, we see the agreements that the filter has helped us narrow down to view, which in the all section includes all agreements that came up in that search regardless of their status. If we look at the search function now, as it suggests, we can search by agreements and users, which we’ll start by searching by Jane, one of our signers. We can see while there are no agreements in progress that Jane is involved with, we see 19 results that came back with a majority of those agreements being completed. Let’s try searching by another signer, Rob Blake, which we see nine results were returned all in varying statuses that we are able to click into and further review to get the details that we might need off of them. We might also search by an agreement name like NDA, which you can see, we have 14 results in this case. Let’s try something a bit more complex, like form field data. If we recall form field data that was entered into one of the form fields of our agreements, we can even search by that, or search by very specific info and see what happens. There you have it. We have an agreement that has that data that was entered into one of the form fields. To further convey that point, we’ll open the agreement. Here you can see where specifically that information was entered into the document. This allows us to really narrow down our search to quickly find the agreements we are looking for.

Okay, we showed you how to view agreements by their status and take additional action on agreements in progress. We were also able to search and filter to narrow down the results for the specific agreement we were trying to track down. Let’s now look at how you can export data for your web forms in bulk sends, both methods used for collecting separately signed PDs with unique data on them, but from the same form template. So rather than viewing each signed PDF one at a time to get the information you’re looking for, let’s take a look at how Acrobat Sign can help you consolidate that data to view from a single source. While we’ll be looking at exporting form data for web forms and bulk send, keep in mind that you can export for all types of agreements, and can do this from the reports page as well, as long as it’s been enabled. For instance, let’s look at this agreement before looking at web forms and bulk sends. We can download the form field data for this agreement and can then open in Excel where it will show us the detail of the transaction. Here we see where a value entered in the field that was captured in the export. Well, my field is represented in the header as custom field three. When creating the document we would have given the field a specific name that would make it easy for understanding the data in a view, such as this one. We also see the completed date, email address of the participant and their role. So now that we’ve looked at export and form field data for an individual agreement, let’s look at exporting data in bulk that may have been captured on something like a web form or a bulk send. In the Web form section, we see that we have additional actions available to us, such as opening the web form or editing it. We can also disable, download the form field data, and can see the varying participants who have participated with the web form so far. We see how many times the web form has been completed or how many are still in progress. Next, let’s download the form field data for our checking application. Selecting this will allow me to view the data in Excel, which includes four unique rows of data that tells us varying details of who have interacted with this web form and the form field data that’s been captured by these participants. We see email address, first and last name, company, and can also see each participants unique phone number that was entered into this form. Imagine viewing one PDF at a time for this information. Having the ability to export in this fashion makes it extremely easy to view and understand the data in a consolidated report. We can also export form field data for our bulk sends, which doing so will offer us a consolidated report to view the data that’s been captured on your agreements that have been sent in bulk similar to what we went over for web forms. An example I like to use here is sending out agreements using bulk send to capture the t-shirt size of each person on your team of 20. Instead of viewing each PDF one at a time to get the t-shirt size for each team member when completed, exporting the form field data for this bulk send will make it easy and seamless to view in a consolidated report. Before we move on, I have another poll for you.

We spent some time teaching you how to manage your Acrobat Sign Agreements in the user interface, as well as best practices when doing so. Next, I’m going to show you how to manage your agreements on the go with the Acrobat Sign Mobile Application.

Logged into the mobile app for Acrobat Sign. We have similar actions to what we had available to us in the Web UI. We can see anything that’s waiting for us to sign as well as agreements waiting for others. We can even send for signature or get a signature in person. But since we’re talking about managing today, we’re not going to be talking about sending here, but we will show you collecting a signature in person with agreements waiting for others. We also see the completed and cancel section that we can access from the mobile app. Let’s start by selecting Waiting for me to sign and see what we have here. I can view additional details about this agreement, while reader mode allows a mobile friendly view of this document. I can also view the history of this agreement, and then finally can sign it, which is what we’re going to do now. Let’s complete all of the required fields, starting with the initial fields. I can draw my initials and save to mobile profile if I wish, and then I’ll apply my safe signature to the signature field, and then we’ll choose the option from the required dropdown field. Now that all required fields are completed, we can complete the process for this agreement directly from the mobile app. What about agreements that are waiting for others? If we click into that, we can see all of our agreements that are in progress, awaiting action from others. Here, I have similar options such as viewing the document details, viewing the document in reader mode, or viewing the history of the agreement. Additional actions include canceling the agreement or replacing the current signers. But one unique feature that the Acrobat Sign mobile app offers us is to capture signatures in person, which is what the pen icon will initiate. Selecting the pen icon then prompts us to pass the device to the participant who will then confirm that the email address listed is their own. Finally, they view the document and sign the agreement, just as we did when signing our agreement on the mobile app. And just like that, we were able to capture an electronic signature from someone else in person. Next, let’s look at our completed agreements from the mobile app. We can see the high level details of our completed agreements, such as the participants involved, the date the agreement was completed, and the message. We can view in reader mode, as well as view the history of the agreement, showing the sequence of events as we might’ve seen them in the web UI. Finally, we have additional options available to us, such as Get or Share the PDF or Print. We can also see our agreements that have been canceled or decline just as we could from the web UI. With the Acrobat Sign app, you can easily manage and track your Acrobat Sign Agreements on the go. Okay, we covered the ins and outs and best practices for managing your Acrobat Sign Agreements from viewing your agreements by status while managing and tracking them to using the filter and search function to locate specific agreements. We export a web form and bulk send data to view in consolidation. And then finally, we looked at managing your agreements on the go with the Acrobat Sign mobile application. I have one last poll for you. I’d love to know if you’ve learned something new from today’s session.

As a reminder, this session has been recorded and will be available within 24 hours right here where you join today. You’ll also receive an email with a link to the recording for on-demand viewing. Before I let you go today, let me point out a few resources you can bookmark to help you find answers to any questions we weren’t able to get to today. We’ve dropped those links in the Q&A pod. The first is the Adobe Help Center, where you’ll find user guides, tutorials, and can use the search function to find what you are looking for. Next is the Adobe Experience League. Here you can access a vast library of learning content and courses, get personalized recommendations, and connect with Bell learners. The Acrobat Side Support Community is another resource where you can view past discussions, join current ones or start your own. These Monthly Skill Builder webinars are a great place to learn new skills or brush up on existing. You can register for future events and watch past webinars on demand. And finally, the Acrobat Sign Resource Hub is a one stop shop for everything Acrobat Sign. It includes tips and tricks, tutorials, customer stories, the latest integrations and more. We’re always updating and adding to it, so be sure to check back frequently. Thanks for joining. I’m Weston Romero, and this has been another session of Adobe Acrobat Sign Skill Builder. Happy sending. Happy signing. (upbeat music)