DocuSign Sightings: Rant of the Week: Techno Trail of Dust

 I found a fantastic blog post earlier this week about the effects of changing technology on business, specifically around the documents generated in the course of doing business. These documents need to be verified, signed and returned for business to move forward.

The blogger, Jon Griffith, brought up two great points. The first discussed emailing attachments of large files. The second concerned electronic signature and online contract execution.

E-mail Attachments – Really?

According to Jon, e-mail’s initial purpose is to send and receive short messages electronically. Then someone invented the attachment feature. Attachments take up bandwidth, especially when you’re emailing large file to multiple recipients. If you want to share a file with multiple people, Jon suggests creating a central repository such as a Web site or file sharing site where those interested in your content can go download your files at their leisure.

YouTube and Vimeo hosts users’ videos that they can then share through other social networking or sharing sites, including flickr, Del.icio.us, Facebook, and Digg. Those interested in the videos can also watch them directly on the site. Flickr enables its users to share their photographs. By publishing their photos to the Web, Flickr’s users can avoid sending emails with 20 photographs attached. If you want to share slide decks, such as those made with Power Point, Slideshare is worth checking out. I could go on ad infinitum, but I think you get my point.

Digital Signatures – They Just Make Sense

Jon is a smart guy:

DocuSign is an absolutely brilliant tool that allows you to send anything you have on your screen through a printer driver to a digital signature Web site. The recipient clicks a few tabs on the document and the document is stored online permanently for you to access at any time.

In addition to his discussion about the ease of DocuSign as a E-signature and electronic contract execution (ECE) tool, Jon also shares his perspective on handwritten signatures. We’ve previously written about the security flaws of wet signatures and Jon expands on that discussion, pointing out that scanning a wet signature, using a photo-editing program and inserting it on to a document is fairly easy.

For example, with wet signatures, you (1) download (2) print, (3) sign, (4) scan, (5) re-attach, and then (6) send. Then the other party has to do the same.

With DocuSign, you (1) print to DocuSign, (2) indicate needed signatures, (3) click to sign, (4) send. However, the other party only needs to click and can do it from anywhere in the world anytime they want. As the sender, you are immediately notified when they’re done signing. It’s fast and easy. You can complete the process even in your jammies.

From sharing content online and therefore saving hosting and bandwidth costs to using online contract execution services like those provided by DocuSign, you can leverage technology to save on operating costs and accelerate your business.

Image courtesy of flickr user Mzelle Biscotte under Creative Commons.