Acrobat Sign 101 - Getting Started

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today and welcome to this edition of Adobe Sign Skill Builder. Before we jump in, I’d like to remind you that this session is being recorded and you’ll receive a link to the recording afterwards for On Demand Viewing. If you have questions during the session, please drop your question into the Q&A pod on the right side of the screen where we’ll have an expert on standby ready to answer. Let’s jump right in. My name is Westin Romero, technical product evangelist at Adobe Together. We’ll go over the basics of e-signatures while I show you the ins and outs of sending, signing and managing your Adobe Sign Agreements. We’ll start by addressing what electronic signatures are and how they’re different from digital signatures. Then we’ll show you the process of collecting e-signatures on your documents, using Adobe Sign from identifying your signer, preparing your document to the signers experience and their options as a participant. After that, we’ll show you how to manage your agreements that are in progress and where to access the completed PDF, including the signed document and its audit report. Finally, we’ll go over the steps for creating your own signature that you can use when signing documents with Adobe Sign. That all stated. Let’s jump right in. Let’s start with addressing what an electronic signature is. Simply put, an electronic signature is an efficient and valid method for collecting approval and sign off on your electronic documents with Adobe, Sign your agreements are secure, verifiable and can replace paper in virtually any process. If you take a step back to see where electronic signatures are being used, they’re being used in every aspect of an organization from customer facing front end processes to back office operational functions. So what are the differences between electronic and digital signatures then? Well, digital signatures are technically classified as a form of electronic signature. However, while valid electronic signatures are capable of providing proof of the participant who signed the document they signed and their intent to sign digital signatures offer increased signer identity authentication and signature encryption. Electronic signatures have been accepted for almost all type of agreements. However, in highly regulated industries and specific regions, digital signatures are being adopted by trust service providers for third party validation and certificate encryption. Regardless of type of signature required, Adobe Sign can support both electronic and digital signatures for your document and signature workflows. Okay, We provided a high level overview of what an electronic signature is and how they’re different from digital signatures. We’re now going to go over the steps for sending an agreement to a single signer from the Adobe Sign User interface. So now we’re logged in to the Adobe Sign Web interface, where we’re going to sign an agreement now for signature to a single signer. We can begin this process from a couple of different places and they’ll all get us to the same goal. So choose the one that makes the most sense for you. We can select send from the tab across the top to go straight to the send page. We can also get there by clicking the big blue request signatures button. Or we can start from the library if we know that there is an existing document template that we want to send out for signature. In this case, let’s start with request signatures and this will bring us to the same page. Since we’re starting from scratch, all these fields are blank and we just have to complete the information to send this agreement to be signed. Think of this like sending an email. You enter the email address of your recipient, add a subject line, enter text into the body of the email, and then finally add your attachment. In a few minutes, I’ll show you what this looks like for your signer. Starting from the top will go to the recipient section and identify our signer. Signer, Jane. And then onto the message section where we’ll name the agreement. So the signer knows what the document is. Agreement for Signer. Jane Great will see that a default message for the signer is generated based on the name of the agreement we entered. We could customize further if we wanted, but for now, we’ll keep it as is. Now we’ll add the document to be signed. This can be a document I have stored in my Adobe Sign Library of reusable templates or a file I have in a cloud storage location, or just a file I created on my computer, which is what I’ll choose here. Now, I haven’t prepared this document in any special way, so it doesn’t have any preexisting fields on it. It’s just a regular word file to make this a Philip all assignable form. We’ll have to check the box marked preview and add signature fields that will allow us to place form fields and mark where to sign before the agreement goes out to sign. Or Jane. Before I send, I can also take a minute to check out a few additional options for this agreement, which you’ll see on the right side of the page. For instance, I may want to password protect the signed file, so it’s only accessible to authorized parties. I can add a deadline after which the document will no longer be available for signature if it hasn’t been signed already. Or add an automated reminders to go out to the signer if she hasn’t signed the document after a certain number of days. I’m not going to use any of those options for this session. So we’re all set to continue. When I’m ready to send, I click next. Since we have to add form and signature fields will be taken into Adobe Signs authoring environment. This lets us not only review the document before we send it, but we can also place those fields to collect information and a signature on this agreement from SIGNER Jane. We have a couple of different options here in terms of how we place formulas on the document. We can use Adobe’s artificial intelligence agent known as Adobe Sensei, to detect and place those fields for us. Or we can manually drag and drop form fields to their respective location from the right hand pane. I’ll be showing you both methods so you can pick your favorite. Let’s start with Adobe Sensei because this is a really simple way to get a head start if there are a lot of fields on your form. I’ll just click this button in the upper left that’s prompting me to place the fields immediately. We see those detected fields up here on the form. Here’s the signature field that will let Cyanogen add an electronic signature to the agreement. And I can also see fields for her full name and date field, both right where they’re supposed to go. So Adobe sensei even knew what type of fields were needed here. Very cool. While Adobe Sensei got us started by placing those fields, I can also add or remove fields manually to any form I have in Adobe Sign. The drag and drop interface lets me go find a field in the menus in the right hand pane and simply drag that onto the form wherever I want it. So here’s the initial field for center Jane to initial next to these NDA terms that I can just drop into place. Then if I open up the data fields accordion menu, I can grab a dropdown to ask Cyanogen to select an option from several items. Once it’s on the form, I have the ability to resize the fill to fit nicely for any form field you drop onto your form. You can edit the specific options for the field by right clicking on the field and choosing edit. This will pull up the field Properties menu where you can find a lot of details for each specific form. Fill. I like to name all of my fields to keep things organized, so I’ll call this one color and make sure that this is a required field for the signer by taking this box. Now I can add the options to my dropdown menu here and I’ll just put in red, blue and green as our options. So now Cyanogen can pick one of these items from the list for any of these fields. I can also add a tooltip. This is a great way to clarify the response you’re looking for from your sire. So here I’ll put in a favorite color to give some more context to Jane. If she hovers over this field with her cursor. Okay. These options are all set, so I’ll click. Okay. So now you’ve seen how to leverage Adobe Sensei to detect form filled placements for you, as well as how to manually drag and drop fields onto the form exactly where you want them. Any form fields, whether placed by Adobe Sensei or by you can be further defined in the filled properties dialog. Great. We’re making good progress here. Now this NDA is a form I need to get signed over and over again by people working with me. Do I need to do all of this prep every time I want to send it out? No. Let me show you how easy it is to save this work for future use. Down in the lower right, I have a little checkbox that says Save as template by ticking that box. I’m saving this form to my library where I can access it later. Remember when we started the setup process? I had the option to start from library. This is where I’d access a reusable document like this one. We’ll be seeing that process a little later. In fact, I’ll use the same form that we just created together right now. So stay tuned for that. For now, this document is ready to send out to Signer Jane for her signature. I’ll hit send. And since we’re saving this as a template, I’ll be asked to give the agreement name so I can find it later. I don’t want this to have such a specific name, so I’ll edit this to be something more generic. The center can always edit the agreement name during the same process that we went through a few minutes ago. So this is fine for our template. I’ll now select, save and send. Okay, we did it. We just successfully sent an agreement out for signature. Now our signer will get an email asking them to sign, which will be looking at that experience shortly. Okay. We sent a document for signature to a single signer after placing the needed signature and form fields on the document. Let’s return to the send page. But this time, let’s go over sending to multiple participants, as well as some of the additional options available before sending the document for signature. So let’s come back to Adobe Sign and try sending another document. We already walk through the basic process of sending a single document to a single signer. But what if you need more than one signature on an agreement? Let’s take a look at that right now. To do that, we’re actually going to start from our library this time. This will pull up all of the templates that I’ve created or that my admin has made for my team to use. Here’s that template that we made earlier. So I’ll go ahead and grab that one and click start. This brings us right back to that same sandwich we saw earlier, but this time you can see the document already loaded up in the file section. So we’re off to a running start. Let’s go ahead and add our signers email addresses. We’ll start with Signer Jane again. But this time, let’s pause for a few minutes to look at a few extra details for her. If I click the dropdown next to her email address, I can see that I actually have a lot of different roles to choose from for Jane, not just signer. New participants are automatically entered in as signers, but she could also be an approver, an acceptor, a certified recipient, form filler or delegator. All of these roles participate in different ways and they’ll all be a part of the official record of the file. So whenever we go to look at the audit trail for this file in our Adobe Sign account, we’ll be able to see that this particular individual approved or accepted the document, completed their fields or delegated to another signer. Using these different participant roles is a great way to take a lot of your process. Digital. Not just signing workflows. Okay, great. Next, how do we know how our signers are who they say they are? We need to make sure that these signatures are coming from the right people and aren’t fraudulent, for that will use the signer authentication tools to identify our signers. We can see here that we have a number of ways to do so by default. Adobe Sign uses the email method, which lets us identify the signers simply by their email address. This is adequate for most signature transactions, as the signer is likely to be the only one who has secure access to their email account. But if you need a more robust authentication option, we can add an additional layer of ID. You can ask them to enter a password before allowing them to sign or send them a verification code through SMS or a voice call. We also have knowledge based authentication currently only available to signers in the United States or Adobe Sign Authentication, which would require the signer to sign into an Adobe Sign account before viewing and signing the document. The final and most secure option to ask the signer to use is a government ID like driver’s license or passport. These are all different methods that we can use to further verify the identity of our signer. And these methods, when used, will be captured on the audit report. But again, email is usually adequate verification. So I’ll leave it there. Okay, so let’s say I want to add myself to this workflow. Maybe I need to get final approval of the document once signer Jane completes her part, also looked at me and you’ll see that I’m automatically added as the second signer, but I don’t actually need to add a signature to this document. I just need to review and approve it. So I’ll change the role dropdown next to my name to Approver. I could go on and add additional participants here one by one, but let’s try something different. I’m going to add what’s known as a recipient group. A recipient group lets me send this document to a defined set of people, and Adobe Sign will accept a signature from any one of them. In this case, I need someone from my legal department to sign off on this agreement. It doesn’t matter who on that team signs the file. I just need a signature from someone in this group. I’ll enter the email address of everyone on the team in this recipient group, and anyone on this list can sign off. It just depends on who opens the agreement first and then signs it. Basically, what we are doing here is identifying a third participant. We just don’t know who specifically that participant will be, and we don’t care as long as it’s someone on that list. The agreement will be valid. Everyone in this group will receive an email notifying them to sign and whichever one was able to get to it and sign off on it first is the one who moves the workflow forward. Okay, with that we have defined and customized a multi participant workflow. Looking at the toggle above the recipients list, these signers are currently set to complete the workflow in any order. They’ll all get an email at the same time to go in and take action on the file according to the role I set for them. This is fine for a lot of documents, but for the workflow we just define, we need each of these steps to be taken in a specific order. First signer Jane needs to sign the document. Then I need to approve the signature. Then someone from the legal team needs to finalize and sign off to make sure these signers go in order. I’ll make sure the toggle is switched to sign in order. Now, the agreement will be sent first to Jane. Then when she’s done, it’ll come to me. And when I’ve approved it, the document will go on to the legal team. You’ll also notice that there are now numbers on the left of each signer to indicate signing order. I can drag and drop signers into the order I want, or let two or more signers complete a step in parallel. But for now, I’m happy with the signing order we have. The last thing I want to talk about here in terms of the recipients options is the private message, and that’s something you can add with the conversation bubble icon that you see here. What the private message does for us is it allows us to add a message for each participant individually. In addition to the message, all participants will see in the body of the email notification. It’s a great way to tell an identified participant a specific detail that only they should know about the document and others wouldn’t necessarily need to see or shouldn’t see. Okay, great. So now that we’ve identified all of our participants, we’re ready to send this document out for signature again. Since we chose this agreement from our existing library of templates, we’ve already set up all of the form fields needed on this document so we don’t have to preview and add signature fields again. We’re ready to just send this out for a signature. I’ll go ahead and click send, and that’s all I have to do. The document is out for signature to those signers. Okay. We went over the sender’s experience, including the options available for customizing the document workflow before sending the agreement for signature. We’re now going to switch gears and go over the signers experience and the options that are available for them. Now we’re playing the part of Signer Jane, who just received an email from Senator Jones when she opens it up. She sees a note asking her to sign an agreement. She’ll also see the custom message we included in our first send a few minutes ago. When she’s ready, she can just click, review and sign. She’ll click, continue and acknowledge that she’s read the Adobe Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. And before she begins interacting with the form fields that she’s been assigned, she’ll see that she has a few options as a signer. She can read the agreement in its entirety and go into read mode. She can delegate the signing response ability to someone else if there’s someone else who should be completing this process, as she maybe believes that she was wrongly identified as a signer, or if there’s something in this agreement she doesn’t want to sign her name to. She can also decline to sign. She could type in a message here and could let the initiator of this transaction know that she’s declining to sign and give her reason. She can also see the option to clear any of the document data that she enters on this form just in case she needs to start over. She can view the history of this document or download the PDF strictly as a certified PDF. She won’t be able to make edits or anything like that. Okay. And now that we’ve looked at her options, we’ll see that we can also view the message that Sender Jones included for her. Here we have a couple of form fields that are optional, not required, whereas down below we have some fields that we see that are required. Remember, we set that up in the field properties when we created this agreement. So click into the initials field and type in her initials to show that she agrees to these terms. Great. Now that she’s applied her initials, she has just two more required fields. We have the dropdown that we added earlier where she’ll select her favorite color. In this case, she’ll choose blue. And then we’ll click into the signature field to sign the agreement. So Jane has a few different options here in terms of how to sign. She can type her name for a font based signature. She can draw her signature using her cursor or trackpad. She can also upload an image of her signature if she’s got one stored on her computer, or she can use her mobile device. If she chooses this option. She’ll get in as a mess with a link to a page where her signature would be captured and automatically routed back to the document in her browser. But in this case, let’s stick to the type option here and type out sign or Jane. Then Jane will select apply and you’ll notice that the name is automatically entered in the full name field based on what Jane typed in the signature field. Super easy. So now that we’ve applied the signature, we’re able to select click the sign at the bottom. And just like that, Jane has completed and signed the form. We’ve gone over both the sender and the signers experience using Adobe Sign. Let’s return to the perspective of the sender and go over the steps for managing agreement workflows that are in progress, as well as identify where to access a copy of the fully signed PDF after it’s been completed. We’ll do this from Adobe Science Managed page, where we have full visibility into all of our transactions at every stage, including items that are waiting for me to take action. I’m dropped right into the Waiting for Me section because there’s an Adobe Sign agreement that is waiting for my approval. As you can see here, I have this agreement between Bodega and ABC. And what’s really great about this is because I’m an Adobe Sign user, any document that sent to me from Adobe Sign will automatically be placed in this waiting for you cue where I can essentially log in at the end of the day and see any documents that are waiting for me to sign. Way better than having to go through my inbox and sort through all of my emails for notifications. This is a consolidated way of seeing everything that’s waiting for me to take action on. So let’s click this agreement and sign off on it. Now I’ll be able to view this document that will look very similar to the one that Signer Jane just completed. I’m able to go right in and complete some of these fields. Adobe Sign already knows who I am, so no extra authentication is needed for this agreement. I’ll just apply Center Joan’s initials and sign in the signature field. And just like that, we’re able to select click to sign. And now our document will be completed. Let’s return to the managed page where we’ll take a look at agreements that are in progress and that have been completed. So again, we’re able to manage our queue and take action on documents and also check in on any agreements we’ve sent for signature. Looking through the In Progress section, we can see there’s that agreement between Bodega and ABC. The one we just signed is in progress because there’s one more signer who needs to complete the workflow. And when we click into this transaction to view the details, we can open the document to view it, or we can send a reminder directly from here to remind the last signer that they need to sign. And then we have some additional options on the right hand side that allow us to open the agreement, send the reminder, cancel the transaction, download the PDF and order report in its current state as well as see the recipients. We see here that we completed our steps as Center Jones. While it’s currently waiting for Signer Jane to add her signature, and if we needed to go in and replace the signer if Jane was unavailable or incorrect, we actually have the option to add an alternate recipient here so that someone else could sign in her place. Finally, the activity section allows us to see the sequence of events that have taken place so far. This activity is very similar to what you’ll see on the full audit report just at a higher level. From right here we see that the document was created by Senator Jones on this date at this time. Then he signed and now it’s out for signature to our next participant. So this is really great for allowing us 24 seven visibility into the status of our documents and lets us take action on them as needed. Now let’s look at completed documents to see what we can do there. So in one of the agreements completed today, Signer Jane was the only signer and she successfully signed the document. Now we have the document automatically cataloged here in the completed document section. We can click into it just as we can for our agreements in progress. We can open it or can download the PDF directly from here. Here we have high level details as well as the actions that are available for this completed document. One of the things you might do is share this finished agreement with someone. So if we select share, you can let others view and access this agreement as necessary. And then of course, you have a message that you could include to let them know why you’re having them review it. Okay. Maybe we want to add a note to this agreement for our reference, and I can do so by adding notes. And maybe I want to put, you know, renewal date or whatever that might be, let’s say October 31st, 2025. And hey, look at that. I now have that added no, and I’m able to see if I ever go back to this transaction. Okay. Let’s go ahead and let’s actually download the PDF. So we’re able to download and access the fully signed document from here. I’m going to open this up to read it in Acrobat DC. Adobe Sign acts as a storage mechanism for all your signed documents indefinitely, so you can always access those files from here if you need to. However, you might have a means for externally archiving your documents and you may also have a data or document retention policy which tells Adobe how long these documents should live on our servers before they are permanently deleted and no longer accessible from Adobe Sign. You also have the option to remove your documents manually as well, but in the interim, if you don’t have that document or data retention policy enabled, Adobe Sign will store those documents for you indefinitely. And now we see that completed document in Acrobat DC and you can see the tamper proof sill running across the top there. The blue seal shows us that the document is certified by Adobe Sign and that it’s a valid certified document. No changes have been made once the signature was applied and no changes are allowed to this document. So this ribbon is just letting us know that the seal has not been broken. It’s an active sill that protects the authenticity of this document. There we see our final fields and then furthermore, we scroll down and we’re able to see, of course, the signature field, the name and the date field. All right. Let’s go back to the managed page. And this time I’m going to show you the full audit report. The audit report is going to show us the fine details surrounding the signed document. It’s not the signed file itself, but rather the supporting document that is also certified and gives us additional context about the transaction. We can see some high level details, such as the date that the transaction was created, who it was created by the status as well as the transaction ID. And here we see now the sequence of events. So from start to finish we see each step that was taken and the date and time that those steps were taken. And we even capture some details, such as the timestamp. And finally we see where the agreement was completed, basically identifying this transaction as a complete one. There’s no other participants that were required to take action on this document. All participants have played their part now confirming the status of this agreement as completed. Great. We’ve gone through the entire experience showing you the basics of sending, signing and managing your Adobe Sign Agreements. The last thing we’re going to go over is creating and saving your very own signature to use when signing documents with Adobe Sign. So to set up a signature will come over to our name on the top and we’ll go to my profile. And in the profile section on the left hand side, we’ll have a section called My signature, and this is where I’ll have the ability to create and save my signature. And initials will select, create. And we have a few options for creating a save signature. We could use our cursor or trackpad to draw a signature. We can upload an image if we wish, or we can use our mobile device to sign. And in fact, this is going to be the way that I create the signature. So I’m going to prompt Adobe Sign to send me a text. This SMS will include a link for me to create a signature from right here on my phone. I’ll follow the link. And while I do have the option to use my finger to sign on my phone screen, I think I’d rather upload an image if I have an image of my signature already, I could just get it from my photos. But what I want to do instead is actually just take a photo. This is going to activate my camera and I’m going to go ahead and just capture this image. Okay? I captured the image and now we can select use photo and the Adobe Magic is going to clean up the image for us. Let’s like done and get that signature successfully sent back to Adobe Sign. Awesome. Now we have that captured here. I can select apply. Now I have that saved signature that I can use any time I am signing a document with Adobe Sign now I can go and create my initials as well and have the same set of options, whether I’m using my cursor to draw that or uploading an image. So now let’s put this in action and let’s sign a document with a new signature I just uploaded. I’ll open this document that needs my signature and come down to the signature field to apply my saved signature. And look at that. We have our signature that was just captured cleanly and we’re able to now select click to sign and use this on the document. While it’s not legally necessary for an electronic signature to resemble your ink signature, it is just that much more secure and recognizable to you when you can see your signature on a document. We went over the basics of e-signatures while I showed you the ins and outs of sending, signing and managing your adobe Sign Agreements. We also went over how to create your very own signature that you can use when signing agreements with Adobe Sign. This has been Adobe Sign 101. Thanks, everyone.