This week, DocuSign announced DocuSign Connect which is a suite of application integration services that allow SMBs, enterprises, and vendors to integrate DocuSign’s electronic signature and online contract execution platform into any 3rd party or in-house business application; including CRM, ERP, ERM, BPM, and CLP systems.

This week’s announcement is an excellent example of how we are expanding DocuSign’s award-winning platform to include a broader set of core capabilities.

Together the DocuSign Connect Service & API enable complete contract workflow within DocuSign while dynamically extending DocuSign into a company’s other critical business applications. The system also delivers a myriad of other features, including real-time contract status, contract data changes/updates, etc.

Perhaps most important, DocuSign Connect illustrates exactly why DocuSign stands apart from the rest of the market. The system establishes DocuSign as much, much more than a pure play ‘esign vendor’. We’ve moved WAY beyond the simple ‘just get a signature’ to facilitating the entire contract execution process. And great evidence of this is in our customer feedback.   

With DocuSign’s technology advancements over the past year we are now enabling the entire electronic contract execution (ECE) phase, helping companies move abandon traditional and disjointed manual and paper contract execution process to fully digital processes.

Yes, the ability to obtain a signature electronically unlocked this new capability, but it is really only one part. ECE is similar to, but really extends to several other large markets such as BPM, CLM, and CRM. Consider a few of the core elements of a true ECE system – and the enormous impact this can have on any business:

  1. Conversion of existing documents and forms into secure managed objects that can be automatically assigned workflow processes and can be sent from desktops, ecommerce applications, or integrated into other critical systems that send contracts for signature to ensure transactions are executed from start to finish in a managed fashion.
  2. Creation of complete ’signing workflow’ templates which dictate all aspects of how the transaction is to complete.
  3. Enabling secure, managed transport of contracts, forms, and data through a sequenced workflow to recipients that may be internal and external – at the speed of light, worldwide.
  4. Providing a full managed data collection process, including masking using regular expressions, assignment of data collection to specific actors in a transaction, and the return of this data back programmatically to downstream applications without rekeying.
  5. Enabling recipients to receive transaction documents and forms, with the ability to display, automatically navigate from key field or signature to the next and sign using a process that is both easy and familiar to the paper process, and withstands legal requirements of the most stringent laws.
  6. Deep integration on both the document creation and sending sides, as well as the recipient delivery and completion side of the equation.
  7. Aggregates authentication capability enabling full FFIEC compliant multi-layer authentication which is tightly integrated into the data and audit log (which is also secured to ensure legal admissibility should there ever be a challenge).
  8. A ‘Cloud computing’ solution rather than technology installed behind a firewall.

With these (and more) capabilities, DocuSign delivers the full ‘contract execution process’ (ECE), and saves customers literally thousands of dollars per month by handling what is done usually in a set of manual steps involving postage, scanning/imaging, rekeying data, and lots and lots of labor.

As the economy tightens and every business is forced to be more efficient ECE will stand out as the way for leading organization to be more competitive, more secure, and much, much more efficient.

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