Creating and Using Workflows from Beginning to End

Transcript

This session will be recorded and the on-demand video will be available right here. Where you join the topic. As always, please make sure to ask any questions in the Q&A pod on the right side of the screen. We have some Adobe experts here to help and we’ll also have a live Q&A session at the end of my demo. We’ll answer as many questions as possible that for those we aren’t able to get to, there are several great resources you can visit to learn more. We’ve dropped those in the Q&A pod for you to bookmark. Do you ever have issues in your company where documents are sent to the wrong person for signature or perhaps sent the wrong document or maybe documents are sent in the wrong order? These are all common errors but they can have serious consequences such as exposing highly sensitive information to the wrong person. Today we’ll talk about how that can be avoided using Adobe Acrobat Sign.

(upbeat music) Hello again, I’m Chad Keesling. I’m a principal technical marketing manager at Adobe. Today I’ll be talking to you about a feature of Adobe Acrobat Sign that allows you to tailor signing processes to fit specific business needs. Administrators can design and manage workflow templates easily with an intuitive drag and drop editor. Okay, before we get too deep, we have a quick poll for you. Thanks for your responses.

It’s easy to specify the documents to be included in the agreement. The characteristics of the participants form fields to be prefilled by the sender, emails to be sent to the participants and agreement expiration or password options and even more for users workflow enabled and easy to flow send experience where steps can be followed consistently every time. Senders are guided through the send process with custom instructions and fields making the send process easier to use and less prone to errors. Today I’ll be covering the following topics, creating and updating workflows, recent changes to workflow functionality, the user experience for initiating workflows, the admin settings for configuring workflows, how to filter workflows in the new advanced reporting, and finally, we’ll take a look at some new features that have been added to workflow. Only administrators can create workflows. Account administrators can create workflows for their entire account or for specific groups within your account. Group administrators will be able to see all the workflows and can only edit the ones in their group. To create a workflow, go to workflow under the account tab. Here you can see all existing workflows. To create a new one, we hit the plus button.

Creating a workflow consists of defining the following information. Workflow information, define the workflow itself, which includes naming it, entering custom instructions for the sender, using it and granting permission to use it. Agreement info, define and customize the agreement information the displays on the send page recipients, creating a routing of adding recipients, signers and approvers in the require signing order. Emails, specify the emails to be sent to different participants at different steps of the signature process. Documents specify which documents should be included in the workflow. Finally, sender input fields. Here is where you define fields as senders can use to input information when sending the agreement. The send input information is merged into the agreement before it is sent to the signers and approvers. Required fields are identified with a red asterisk. Some field labels are editable. For example, like agreement name. You can click the space to enter the new custom information. Click in the field, enter a custom label. This label will display on the send page when the workflow is used to send a document, in the workflow desire banner the default name of the workflow displays. In this case, now it is NDA workflow. The little dot next to the workflow name indicates the current status of that workflow. Draft or inactive is gray or active, which is a green dot. The following controls are at the right close, the current workflow, save changes and then activate and deactivate. Always remember to do the activate step. This is something it’s easy to forget. Let’s continue editing the workflow.

Next is instructions to sender. These instructions display on the top of the send page when the workflow is used to send an agreement. Also, you can use 10 different HTML tags including image source and HREF tags. If you attend to use source or HREF you’ll need to use fully qualified paths and those will need to be whitelisted. Please send the URLs to your customer success manager. Next is who can use this workflow? The options are selected group, a dropdown field that displays all the groups that the creator has access to. When only one group is selected, any user that is a member of that group has access to send the agreement when using the workflow. When users in multiple groups is enabled for the account, group level admins can create workflows for any group that they are members of. Not restricted just their primary group.

Group level administrators have the authority to edit any workflow shared with the group when they have administrative authority. Account level admins also have the authority to edit group share workflows as they have authority over all groups. The next option is any user in my organization.

Any user in the Acrobat Sign account can use its workflow. Account level administrators can add workflows shared at the account level. We’d like to know how familiar you are with creating and or using workflows.

Here’s where I’d like to highlight a couple of the updates that have been recently made to Adobe Acrobat Sign. These include users in multiple group awareness that I just mentioned. Also, an update to the workflow scope control interface that defines which user can access the workflow. The text label indicating which user groups the workflow is enabled for has been changed from active for to who can use this workflow. The text label for the option to include all group users in the account has been updated from all groups to any users in my organization, and the array or radio buttons used to select an individual group has been changed to a single select dropdown menu with the text label selected group. Let’s move on to the agreement info section. Here we’re prompted to enter a workflow name. We’ll call it NDA. We’ll go ahead and leave it with a default message. You can specify a CC if needed so here you enter the email address of all the CC parties. Email addresses must be separated by either a comma or a semicolon. You can also specify a minimum number of email addresses that can be occluded for the cc and a maximum number of email addresses as well and you can divide whether or not this field is editable. Enabling this option allows senders to edit the workflow CC addresses on the send page. Earlier at the recipient language, the sender can use us to specify the language for the recipient. This setting defines whether or not the language selector displays on the send page and if so, what default language should display.

In the send options you can set the password to open the downloaded PDF. This sets a password on the final signed document that is downloaded after the signing process. Sending this option will also set the signer verification to password. It will use the save of password value, require, enable this option to always require a password for the downloaded pdf. If this option is set the senders cannot disable it on this end page and must provide a password.

Completion deadline, enable this option to allow for the specification of a completed deadline on the send page. Days to complete the agreement, set the default number of days the recipient has to complete the signing process. The number of days specified is always editable on the send page.

Allow authoring of documents prior to sending. Enable this option to allow senders to modify document form fields in the authoring environment. Using the preview option of the send page. Enable the authoring by default, enable this option to automatically enable the preview option on the send page.

In the recipient’s routing section, you can specify the recipients and the routed order per your requirements. You can build very complex workflows with serial, parallel, hybrid, or nested hybrid routing to add another recipient before or after the existing recipient. Click on the ad icon, select the rule. All roles enabled for the account will be available. You want to insert to specify a parallel branch, click the add icon above a recipient and select parallel branches. To delete a recipient cursor over the recipient bubble and then click delete to customize recipient cursor over the bubble and click the added icon. When editing a recipient, you can configure the following, recipient label, email address, the recipient is a sender, when checked, the sender will be inserted as the recipient.

Mark as recipient group. When checked, the recipient will display as an empty recipient group for the sender during the send process, the sender must configure the email addresses of the recipient group. Next role, update the recipient’s role, signer, approver.

Required, enable this option that the signature from the recipient is required editable. Enable this option to allow the sender to update the email address for the recipient on the send page.

Last identity verification. Select what type of identity verification is required for the signer. None, Acrobat Sign, phone, knowledge based authentication and web identity is our possible options as well as password.

Only the options that have been enabled for Acrobat Signed account will be visible.

Enabling the password as identity verification will add the same password to the document. For security preventing viewing the PDF until the password is entered. It’s poll time, again, thanks for participating.

In the email section, you can control which emails are sent during the signature and approval process based upon the various events. For example, you can specify the notification emails be sent to recipients and CCs when the agreement is canceled. In the document section enter document title under files, click the and file icon to attach a document for Acrobat Sign Library. The documents are automatically attached. When you send using workflow the document name automatically defaults to the original name of the uploaded file, but can be changed. You can also specify whether or not this file is required.

You also have the option here to delete the row. Moving on to the sender input fields here, we can add a row for each of the fields that I want pre-populated prior to sending for signature. I’ll click on the ad field, click on the title. I’ll specify the tag that is specified in the template and any default value. I can continue to add fields until I’ve completed all the number of fields that I wish to enter. After I’m done with that I’ve entered all the information necessary for the workflow. I can is save and also remember date activate and that’s all there is to it. Now let’s switch gears and go over what the user experience looks like. I’ll go back to the home tab. From here I’ll select start from library, select workflows, and there’s a workflow I just completed. I’m going to click on that and click start. From there, you see all the settings that I put together when I was creating the workflow. Identify the signer, the document name, the message the actual file that is going to be set in fields that I want to include, so I’ll go ahead and put in a couple names here and click send. Now you can see how much easier it is to do a send without having to add all those settings that have been already predefined in the workflow. Now let’s switch back to the admin perspective and look at the settings that are used to configure workflow in Adobe Acrobat Sign. Go back to the account tab. We’ll go to global settings and go to custom send workflows accounts that want to strongly enforce specific workflows for all their documents and streamline the process of sending and keep to a minimum the amount of input required by the user can fully define all of our document workflows and restrict users from any ad hocs in the entirely. A council one can leverage users in multiple groups can extend the configurable options at the group level settings thereby ensuring the correct signature options and notification processes are enforced. To limit users to only sending with approved workflows, click the setting and you can also enable workflow desire for administrators to enable the workflow authoring environment, that can be turned on and turned off. There’s an additional setting that allows you to enable the newest workflow experience that brings workflows closer to the functionality of the manual send process. You can navigate to account, navigate to account settings, send settings and custom workflow controls. The features that are enabled with this option allow for reflow page layout using digital signatures for one more recipients, configure recipients to use phone-based SMS recipient authentication, configure recipient groups during the send process, and attach documents from all enabled sources during the send process. The last option under custom workflow controls is to enable template defined signature placement template. Defined signature assignment strongly relates to the recipient list as defined in the workflow designer to the appropriate field assignments on your authored forms. For example, if you want to optionally have a co-signer within your signature flow, traditionally this would require two forms because of how the recipients were indexed on the send page, one for the single signer scenario and one for the co-signer scenario. Under the template defined rule structure, you construct one fully enabled forum with all possible recipient fields defined. The recipient signer index as defined in the workflow designer is strongly enforced disregarding, any fields that are assigned to any omitted optional recipients when the agreement is sent. So let’s take a look and see what it looks like in the workflow designer, I’ve updated the NDA workflow to include a parallel co-signer. Now if you notice, I have made this so it is not a required field, however the signer is a required field. Now, if we close this workflow go back to the home stream, start from the library, we’re going to initiate our NDA workflow again notice here the recipients. I’ve got my signer, it’s required. I’ve also got my co-signer that is not.

If I were to remove this co-signer, they’ll be left out of the workflow and only this signer and the recipient will be required. One more thing, before we introduce you to some new features, I want to revisit our reports. to some new features, I want to revisit our reports. If you happen to have attended one of my previous sessions on reporting, you know that I can leverage the new advanced reporting, filter by workflow. Let’s open up one of the reports i’ve already created. I’ll go and grab the agreements for the week. Click on open, and when I click on filters you see I have an option here to select workflow. Click apply, and there I can filter based upon our NDA workflow I just created, I’ll only report on the documents that were part of that NDA workflow. Next, I’ll share with you a new workflow feature called Workflow Automations. This new feature brings the power of Microsoft’s Power Automate seamlessly embedded within the Adobe Acrobat Sign. Power Automate is Microsoft’s low-code no-code solution that gives non-developers the same power and flexibility that normally has only been available by using coding with APIs or application programming interfaces. Embedding Power Automate provides sign users the ability to leverage a large number of pre-built templates as well as the ability to create custom workflows. Users will also have free access to the large Microsoft ecosystem that includes hundreds of standard and premium connectors. I’ll show you a simple example, from the Sign Dashboard, we will select Create reusable workflow like normal but now you see two options. Custom Send Workflow takes you to the traditional Acrobat Sign workflow designer. We will select workflow automation. Here you see we are presented with a list of predefined templates. These are grouped by type. There’s file organization, where we have a variety of flows to save data and signed agreements to other platforms such as SharePoint and Box. There are also a notification and agreement generation templates as well as start from scratch. There are also a number of videos to help you get started. We will select save completed documents to SharePoint template. Here I can change the name of my flow. It also presents a list of connectors that I need for this flow. This will allow me to add or change my credentials for the connectors. Next, I am prompted to select the SharePoint site that I want to save the agreement to. Then I can navigate to the folder path. It already has the file name to use, prefilled which can change if required. Then click Create Flow. Once the flow is saved, you’ll see the flow details screen where you can see the run history, connectors used, and a variety of options including edit. From the edit screen, you can update your configuration of the actions to the flow. From now on all your signed agreements will be saved not only in Adobe Acrobat Sign, but also in SharePoint. This has been just a quick summary a lookout for more detailed overviews coming soon. I have one last poll for you. We’d love to know did you learn something new today? So before we get to the live Q&A, let me point out for you a few resources you can bookmark to help you find answers to any questions we weren’t able to get to today. We’ll drop the links in the Q&A pod for you. The first is the Adobe Help Center where you’ll find user guides, tutorials and can use the search function to find what you’re 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 fellow learners. The Acrobat Assigned Support community is another resource where you can view past discussions join current ones or start your own. These monthly Skill Builder webinars and Past on-Demand 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, and the latest integrations and more. We’re always updating and adding to it so check back frequently. Thanks for joining. It’s been great to be with you and I’m excited to see where you come up with. I’m Chad Keesling and thanks again for joining me today for this Acrobat Sign Skill Builder. Well, with that, let’s go ahead and jump over to the Q&A.

(gentle music) - Hi everyone. Hope you all have enjoyed the session on the workflow. I might do, it’s really important that you guys listen carefully, please don’t leave.

There’s been an update and we are actually going to release the capability that I showed you with the workflow automation that includes Power Automate that is going live next week, May 23rd.

I just wanted to give everybody a heads up on that. Now, a lot of these questions that have been coming through are relating to why don’t I see, you know, workflow on my screen or there’s another question about being able to gain access to the account tab. So one, to be on the account tab, you have to be an administrator but what is changing or has actually already changed is the ability for an administrator to go in and make it possible to allow everyone else to create workflows.

So if you guys are interested in creating your own workflows, talk to your administrator, they could go in and add this option so that you’ll now then get an additional tab on this top of your screen for workflow.

And also there is going to be a setting that’s released when we release the workflow automation option that includes Power Automate. They can turn that on or turn that off as well. So if you guys are interested in using the Power Automate capability for creating workflows, have them turn that on and you’ll be able to then create this traditional type workflows as well as the ones with Power Automate.

All right, let me get back and hopefully, if you have any questions about what I just said, please pop them into the chat window.

So there’s a question about being able to change the underlying document for the templates.

And the best way to do that, I dunno if you are familiar with this, you can actually create a form field template that allows you to be able to reuse just the form fields and put it on a new document. So I think that would satisfy what you’re looking for there.

Question about, is it possible, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. Is it possible to send a document to Laserfiche? So yes, and you actually you can send the document pretty much anywhere but it’s not out of the box. You would, one, you could leverage the API or this is a great example of we’re using the new advanced workflow automation with Power Automate. You can look through the connectors on the Microsoft Power Automate site or actually right within that Acrobat Sign, search for Laserfiche. And if it’s there then it would be very simple just to go ahead and add that connector and then send your signed documents straight out of, just like I showed in the example with SharePoint, instead of SharePoint, you can send it to anywhere else that has a connector. If they don’t have a connector, you can still leverage APIs into those backend systems, but it doesn’t have to be a connector there to be able to leverage Power Automate.

No, there’s a question about can I access, so there’s an earlier question about sending agreements to a thousand people and the answer to that is using something we have called Sendin Bulk that allows me to upload a CSV file that contains all my recipients. And today you cannot currently access or leverage workflows from using that bulk sign feature.

But again, this is another great example of where you could literally recreate the capabilities of Sendin Bulk in Power Automate. So for example, let’s just say I have a SharePoint list with a thousand people on it. Leveraging Power Automate, literally I could pull from that and if I did want to trigger a another process betting that allows me to, you know, conditionally route to different individuals, to do different things during that step, I can absolutely do that, leveraging Power Automate.

Will there be a Power Automate flow to add rows of data to Excel? So again, I wanna make sure that you know that there’s multiple ways of leveraging these flows. You can use a template that already exists or you can just start from scratch and there are definitely already templates and there are connectors allow me to add rows of data, a flow or from an agreement into a Excel spreadsheet, roll by row, yes.

Now there’s a question about as an Adobe Acrobat administrator, can I allow other users to use the Acrobat signed features? As an administrator, you have a pretty granular control in terms of what other folks can do. You can do that by groups primarily. If you’re talking about enabling other individuals to gain access to Acrobat Sign, you would have to add them as a user to send. But always keep in mind that for recipients that are signing agreements, all they have to have is an email address. They don’t have to be added to Acrobat Sign.

Great question, does that, does Adobe Acrobat Sign have conditional routing, perfect use case for leveraging the workflow automation with Power Automate basically what I can do is have some sort of trigger or some sort of event that starts to Power Automate flow. And I’m actually on on June 21st, look out for a webinar where I actually do an example of conditional routing.

I’m taking data and based upon that data, whether like it’s the a purchase order and if the purchase order amount is over this, then I send it to individual A. If it’s under that, I send it to individual B.

There will be an announcement going out about the Power Automated integration that will have links to all the help information. And also there’s videos within the new integration that kind of gets you started.

And yes, there will be documentation.

Is there auto response changeable? Yes, so we have actually we call custom email templates that allow you to be able to change what the data and the structure of all, not just the response but all of the email notifications that go out.

All right, is there a feature to download the data in the signed document as an Excel file? Not out of the box, but definitely using the new Power Automate plug workflow automation.

Think we’re just about out. Let me look and see real quick.

You will, in order to get the capability turned on for you as a non-ad administrator to create a workflow, the administrator will have to turn that option on in the settings.

Well, thanks everybody. Have a great day.