Transforming your Digital Signature Process with Adobe Sign for Dynamics 365 (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Tracey: Hello, everyone. I’m just waiting for the signal that I can go ahead. I can go ahead, right?

Melissa: Sure can.

Tracey: Awesome. Thank you, Melissa. Hi. It’s Tracey from Encore. And thank you so much for joining us today on our webinar about Adobe Sign. I’m Tracey Santos from Encore. And joining me today are Kimberly and Todd from Adobe Sign. We’re thrilled to have them with us today in going over the great functionality of Adobe Sign.

And I just wanna let you know that we are giving away two Amazon gift cards at the end of the webinar. So please stick with us and be entered to the chance to win an Amazon gift card, which would be awesome. And also, if you have any questions, you can actually type them into the question box throughout the webinar, and we’ll be answering all those questions or attempting to answer all those questions at the end of this session. So if you do have questions, just feel free to type them there as well, or if you have any questions afterwards, you can always email Melissa or myself, and we’ll follow up with you. And I’ll hand it over to our valued guests today.

Todd: Thank you very much, Tracey. And thanks, everybody for attending. So, this presentation is about Adobe Sign, but it’s about Adobe Sign via Encore and our partnership with Encore. We’re very, very pleased to be working with Encore as they expand their solutions set, particularly in the Microsoft space. A lot of what we’ll talk about and what we’ll show is how this is part of a solution that many, many companies are already using. It just enhances solutions around productivity, and more specifically, just around getting things signed in a very efficient and paperless form. And so that’s gonna be our focus today. You’re gonna see it in the context of the great Microsoft solutions that you may already be using, particularly on the dynamic side.

We won’t have time to do Office. But just know that if a lot of your workflows might be centered on SharePoint or Outlook, we certainly have integrations there as well, so just that little bit of background to introduce. And let’s see. I have to click pretty hard here. So the first thing is just a minute about Adobe. We are changing the world through digital experiences. And we do that in a number of ways. One of those that we might be most well-known for is everything in the creative and visual space and actually motion space, where, you know, the odds are when you’re watching a TV commercial, or you’re looking at a magazine or a newspaper or an online publication, you know, something that is being delivered as a digital subscription, it was likely created with a set of products called Creative Cloud. So that includes Photoshop, that includes Premiere Pro for the high ends video production.

There’s another area that we do, which is called the Experience Cloud. And what that is, is everything around digital marketing, around setting up campaigns, around managing content, managing advertising spend, lots of different solutions that larger companies use. And the third one, which is our focus today, is Document Cloud, and specifically Adobe Sign. So Document Cloud, no surprise, it’s about managing digital documents, and Adobe Sign, more specifically, is looking at, you know, the critical importance of being able to get things signed, approved, acknowledgments, that type of thing, doing a closed loop process for that. And that’s what Document Cloud does. It’s everything about document management. So those are sort of the three clouds of Adobe Sign.

And then there’s a story that we have, which is specific to Microsoft. And it will be a focus of what we talk about today. In 2016, we launched a strategic partnership with Microsoft, and it’s all about helping businesses transform their customer engagement, really looking at the Microsoft, you know, cloud app space in Dynamics and in Office. Now, we started that in 2016 with Experience Cloud, but Adobe Sign, which is our focus today, came in the next year. So we’ve been working with Microsoft for a couple of years, and that partnership will continue to grow and expand as we go forward. And then just a couple things about this value. Why is it that we’re stopping and we’re spending this energy on our Microsoft partnership?

Well, what we’re trying to do in partnership with Microsoft is give customers more complete solutions across marketing sales and IT. And so the idea is, if you’re a salesperson, we’ll just use that as an example, instead of just being able to generate quotes and proposals, how about generating them and getting them into a package that goes straight out to a customer to be able to sign. That is a more complete solution that we in partnership with Microsoft can provide. Along with that, it allows you to maximize your investment, you center in on a workflow that might be combining Dynamics and Sign. And through each one of our services, that investment will be maximized over time. And then the third point here is that that…you know, it’ll be maximized because the innovation that we will continue to do together will make those solutions, you know, better and better and broader and broader as we go forward.

So now we turn to, well, what’s going on out there in the world with customers? And this is the case…you know, a little bit of humor, but, unfortunately, it’s true in some cases that, you know, customers are having a hard time with a lot of processes that still involve paper, and a lot of that has to do with just getting the right…you know, the right thing on a “dotted line,” and a lot of moving around of paper, and a lot of involving, you know, logistics and shipping, but then also just even generating things. It ends up adding a ton of effort and time. And so now let’s drill into that a little bit.

What are we really talking about here in terms of lost opportunity? Well, you see that for individuals within an organization. They often are spending more than a third of their time on administrative tasks. But, you know, that’s not really what they should be doing. They should be doing their core job function. That’s the first point. But a second point is that this actually can impact revenue. So this isn’t just a matter of cost savings, which it is. That’s true, but it’s also a question of losing revenue opportunities. We see that 69%…and this is an Aberdeen study, by the way. 69% of companies experience excessive deal slippage. And a lot of that, frankly, just has to do with the overhead of getting a deal done and specifically that last mile of getting it signed. And about half say the sales cycle is too long. And a lot of the reason for that is that it’s that last part of the sales cycle that drags on in an unnecessary way.

And then the last thing is when you really think of this more from a customer experience perspective, IDC found that 77%, you know, of companies have automation gaps. And those really have an impact on a customer or a partner or a supplier, whatever the case is. So, you see that there’s a lot of issues. It’s efficiency opportunities on the cost side, you know, costs that are unnecessary, but it’s also revenue loss situations that people encounter. And so, now let’s turn it around to the good side of this. Well, what is the opportunity that an end to end digital document process can provide you? Well, it can provide you getting signatures more than 20 times faster than you do now. And that sounds like a crazy number, but it’s not.

We’re gonna show some examples of some companies that have had sort of before and after studies, and you’ll see that this number is not an exaggeration. Lots of hours saved per user per year because they’re eliminating tasks that just, frankly, take a lot of time and they’re disruptive. You know, they’re moving around and handling paper and printing things and, you know, lots of different issues that come up. And then large opportunities to save a lot of money, even after the investment in moving to the solution. So you invest in the solution. This is a case study that we have, net present value of 1.6 million for this company on an expenditure of about 400,000, so large company. I know this is larger, you know, larger scale. But the point is, is that, you know, there was $2 million of savings, which netted out after the expenditure, 1.6 million on a $400,000 spend. And so, it’s a really, really big opportunity. I know that’s a big company example. The principle holds true for any sized company.

So then just a couple of important things around what is it that we’re trying to do. We want to not just, you know, accelerate revenue. Oh, sorry. I must have…let me go back, itchy trigger finger. Apologies. But the second point here is that this is also something that can reduce legal risk and improve compliance. This digital process gives you a way better step to step trail of everything that is going on and done in a way that passes, you know, really any evolving compliance standards. You get more visibility into the process as you go. You get to see where something is in the approval or signature cycle. And you can check when need to, and you can even set up automated chats. You can have somebody get reminded on a daily basis if their signature is due on a document that they’ve received. And you can definitely improve user experiences. This is just something that…you know, it is a hassle to do things when you’re outside of a seamless digital workflow. There’s a lot of extra steps, a lot of things that are involved that really, you know, they don’t need to be. Okay.

So, I’m gonna explain a little bit about why that is. And the way that we show that is to really show, you know, what is it that is going on now. And what’s happening is that, you know, within a company when a sales contract is going out, we’re just using that example here, but it applies to other things, is that, you know, a sales rep, at the beginning there in the lighter blue shade, is finding a template, creating a contract, emailing it internally so that there can be review internally. So the darker blue there represents his or her VP, but then also legal, who are reviewing this. It comes back to the sales reps to apply edits, further review, and approval. And then finally, you get to the point where you’re ready to send it out. You convert it to PDF. You send it an email. Now it comes across to the customer.

What’s the customer doing? Well, the customer is having to print this, may or may not need to review and send things back but then signing it, then scanning a copy of that, and emailing it back to the company. And then the company is printing that and signing it and scanning it to get to a digital copy. There’s crazy steps of not only creating a physical copy, which companies need in the current sort of state of things but then also having to turn it back into a digital copy. And it’s kind of crazy. And so, finally, you get done and, you know, you’re sharing the document, you’re storing the document, lots of steps that you have here. You know, 22 total steps and 15 of those actually require some manual intervention.

So now, you take a look at, “Well, what could we potentially do if we have the right digital document solution and the right workflow?” So what’s happening is that you’re creating a contract, but you’re doing that really just relying on all of the data that you already have in Dynamics 365 in this sales example. It’s essentially a one-button click, and I’ll show you an example of that a little bit later here. And so, you create that contract. It immediately gets sent out to customer because it’s taking all of the fields, all the contract data from Dynamics 365 and populating that into a document that gets sent out. And so that goes out. It goes to the customer. The customer does not need to do these, like print, scan, you know, steps. They can basically just take it. All they need is an internet connection, essentially. You know, you don’t have to have any environment.

And by the way, just to clarify. Somebody who’s signing things does not need to have this product, Adobe Sign. It’s only for the people who need to create these documents and send them out and get them signed. So the customer just needs a browser. You know, they need an internet connection, they need a device, period. So they sign it, and it comes back. All that data is collected. It can get auto-populated back into Dynamics. It can get auto-populated into SharePoint if that’s a repository of record. But the point is, you know, look what we’ve done here. You know, we’ve taken this process that was 22 total steps and 15, and we’ve cut out all the manual steps and we’ve taken the total steps to four. It’s just a much, much simpler process. And you can imagine how much time that saves.

So a little bit of an overview, and I verbalize this a little bit. But just to be really, really clear, what are we talking about here in terms of integrations, for those of you who are working within the Microsoft Cloud App environment. Dynamics is focused on the D365 sides. So just a little bit of a scoping conversation for you to set expectations where these integrations are. They are with sales, D365 for sales, and D365 for Talent. Where they are not yet is a couple of other things that are of interest to us, and we’ll continue to work those.

Field Service is a prominent example for us. The FO side where you can think of, you know, invoice or finance oriented workflows, approvals, etc., there. We’re gonna be working those as we go, and, you know, we’ll continue to touch base. We’ll have Encore continue to touch base as those develop. But then beyond Dynamics, you’ve got SharePoint, which is very, very important for many companies that use that sort of as their core repository, their legal teams work within it extensively. And then productivity apps, so Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, but then also flow apps, you know, teams inflow and the ways that info is flowing around, or how teams are collaborating. We have integrations into those applications as well.

All right. Now we get back to that previous point that I was mentioning briefly around how can something be 21 times faster. Well, here’s where we start to get the answer to that. Telefónica, which is a telecom company based in Europe, their employee contracts are getting returned in 11 hours since they’ve adopted Adobe Sign. It used to take three weeks. So think of that in workday terms, you know, a day and a half from 21 days. All right. Maybe 15 days. Maybe I’m exaggerating. People don’t work Saturdays and Sundays.

And then, in the contract signing that LeasePlan, which is a Dutch car leasing company, you know, they went from 23 and a half days to 4 days and 2 hours. And then KLM for their rewards program, they adopted the solution, and they did a measurement over a year, “How much paper did we save by adopting this in terms of the signups of customers and the whole process to get enrolled? A million sheets in one year.” And they’ll see other savings as well, in terms of time, you know, other types of things.

And so then one other good thing to touch on is, well, where is this used? And this is where I’m, you know, sort of speaking to those of you attending. And what I wanna convey is that, you know, there could be a number of different use cases that we could potentially do. So we were talking about sales and talking about, you know, contracts, agreements, proposals, quotes, things of that nature. But we’ll also see and show an example that relates more to human resources, and specifically, candidates and bringing on candidates on the offer process. So we’ll give you a little bit of…more of a real-world feel for that. But there are other examples.

So onboarding and the documentation that a new employee, you know, needs to take on, benefits enrollment, kind of similar to the…maybe part of that onboarding, policies, things of that nature, certainly legal, where their touch point could be Dynamics, but it could definitely also be something on the Office and SharePoint side of the house, in terms of where is it that they want to center their document management workflow or their contract management workflow. They may be doing that even in Word. You know, they may be saying, “Look, I wanna apply these templates, but then do my initial editing in Word and then generate documents straight from there for signature.”

IT and operations when you think of the whole world of, you know, vendors or projects and the authorizations and, you know, acceptances that are associated with that. Procurement is kind of a similar thing, you know, suppliers and everything that you’re doing for them, or RFPs, when you’re bringing on a new company to do something. But then there’s all these other examples. You know, marketing may have contracts for incentive programs or campaigns, the resources team with, you know, leases, facilities planning, things like that, you know, customer service for work authorizations, work orders, all kinds of different use cases that Adobe Sign fits well. And here’s the main reason why it really applies well across all those things.

The main reason is that we talk a lot about sign. The product is named Adobe Sign, and you think of just, “Hey, I gotta go get something signed.” But that is by far not the only thing that you use the product for. You can use it just for fillable forms to be collecting information from a customer, or a partner, or whatever the case is. You can use it for internal approvals, and that this, by the way, is a very, very common use case, where when things need to go through a chain, and you want to formalize that chain, that then you kick off a project or a process, and then you create essentially a sequential order of people approving that process.

Accept is an interesting one, especially, you know, for legal and, in some cases, for sales, where there is a structure. It could be an incentive program where it’s not negotiable. And so you want to just put out a standard and just essentially have a quick click to accept. And that’s all the customer needs to do. You know, there doesn’t need to be a signature per se. It’s a standardized document. There’s no variation. That’s another example. And then even just, you know, certifying recipients and having an audit trail and showing that somebody viewed and acknowledged the document. That’s another example. You know, what I wanna convey to you here is that there are a lot of ways that this product can help your business, not just externally with your customers or your partners, but even internally.

Then one last thing before we actually start to take a look at demos. This is very, very important and will continue to be, you know, a core operating principle that Adobe manages, which is, internally, with our own security platform and our own data centers, just managing our own cloud services, we take a lot of very, very detailed and, you know, really strong steps to protect all of our cloud apps. It’s such a big issue. You know, we see so many instances of data being compromised. And it’s a huge, huge, you know, burden and responsibility. But we definitely take that on, and we’ll continue to do so. Then you look outside of our own walls. And there’s questions of compliance to either legal and regulatory standards, or evolving data, customer data standards when you are sending out something and getting it signed and ensuring that you have the right security and privacy practices in place. So just know that this is something that we will continue to work very, very hard on.

Okay. So now, let’s have some fun, and let’s kick into taking a look at a couple of the apps. So these are gonna be pretty quick. I think they’ll be about 5 or 10 minutes each. It’s just gonna give you a flavor for sales through the Sales app integration. And then we’ll do one for Talent as well. So you can see what that Talent app in D365 looks like. So first of all, here we are in sales. This is a screen that a salesperson or a sales ops person is very, very familiar with. You know, they are working on an opportunity. You can see the opportunity here is checking account. We have a contact. I don’t know if anybody can see my mouse if I move my mouse around, but I’m over here on the left side. You know, you have the account, the contact. You’ve got detailed information about the opportunity. And then when you scroll over to the right, you know, you’ve got other relationship type stuff that you can be looking at. Oh, okay, good. Yeah. By the way, I do apologize. I think the thing that I’m not smart enough to figure out is that on my screens that I’m showing, I think you guys might be seeing the little console for the meeting on the right.

Kimberly: No.

Todd: Okay, good. Okay, good. Hopefully, you’re not. Great. And then in the middle, it’s more, you know, points around what’s the activity associated with this, you know, what’s the timeline, and then the stages. You can see the stages at the top. So now let’s keep going. And you can see that top Ribbon nav. So everybody’s familiar with the nav components and elements from Dynamics. We’ve got top nav, and then with Sales Hub, we also have this additional component that we’ll take a look at down the side, the left side.

And so, literally, you just come right in here and in the ellipses, meaning your sort of, you know, additional actions, you’ve got Send For Signature. And so you hit that. And essentially, at this point, all you’re doing is you’re then choosing, “Oh, okay, which template am I using to take the information on this specific opportunity for Dynamics and then send that out to the customer?” So they’ve got a banking template that has been developed. It knows which fields to take from Dynamics, and then, of course, which Boilerplate language is on that, and so that gets sent out. So they’re gonna create the agreement. You can look at the agreement details.

And then you see over on the right side, you know, some options essentially for how you can configure this as you send it out. You can see that in the middle, we’ve got the file attached. And that’s it. It’s ready to go. But the point is, is that it’s taking everything from Dynamics fields through field mapping, and Adobe Sign tees all that up, without you having to place any additional effort to do that. So out it goes. And the agreement is sent. And so then what you can do is you can start to, you know, follow that and track it. And so you hit the left side nav. And you’re familiar with this if you’re a Sales Hub user. You know, you’ve got these components of Sales Hub you can access, but now you see Adobe Sign is here as part of that. And so you can go into agreements, and you can see a status. And again, this customer experience is just like what you’re using the rest of the time when you’re in D365 for Sales.

So, it’s out for signature. You can see that, and you see the status over on the side as you drill into it. And then you can come back, and you can take a look at…this is the icon over here on the left side for the dashboard. So you go hit the dashboard, and instead of seeing your opportunities, now you’re not only seeing your opportunities, but you’re seeing, you know, your activity to get things signed, and how have things strawn out by month. How many of those have been completed? And you can see it at a global level there.

Now, I’ll do this next part fast because the point is simple. The point is that not only can you use it from the desktop, that the great people at Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have the mobile app that’s not just, you know, sort of the tail end of, “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna get this document, and I’m gonna sign it.” No, no, no, you can actually do your work doing the mobile app, which is really cool. So you hit Sales Hub from their mobile apps for D365 for Sales. And you go in and you essentially can do everything that you just did. It’s just that, obviously, it’s laid out differently for the mobile device. And so you see the same pieces of information. And you can take the same actions.

And by the way, I did that quickly. But down at the bottom, you see that same dot, dot, dot, that same, you know, additional actions icon that they have. And so you send it out. And again, it’s accessing your templates, because all that’s a cloud-based service, all that is something that you can access from any device, especially now that you’ve got this awesome app from Microsoft. So, you’re creating the agreement, you’re making sure the recipients are right, you’re making sure the document is right, and you send it out. And it’s really just mimicking the process that you just saw. And this goes all the way down to the notion of the dashboard and being able to go in and both look at your agreements and see the status of your agreements but then also to see it in the detailed view of your activity over time. So anyway, it’s really pretty interesting.

The second one that’s worth about 5 to 10 minutes, just to give you guys another example, is Talent. So we’ll take a quick look at Talent. Now, we have to sort of, you know, change our mindset here. We’re no longer a salesperson or a sales ops person who is working on an opportunity. We’re now a hiring manager. And we are working on closing and opening with the candidate that we have. And so now here we come. We’re into the Talent screens. And you see, you know, the manager’s activity, everything that he has going on. And so…I’m sorry. That was actually the candidate. So now we’re gonna take a look at the candidate and preparing the offer for the candidate. So it’s a principal consultant position. We’re gonna prepare the offer.

Those of you familiar with offers and offer management know that you can create packages. And that’s just sort of the combination of, you know, hey, if it’s a technical person, which is this example, what is that combination of, you know, benefits, bonuses, etc., that they have? And you can predefine those. That’s the case here. So the technical package is what’s going to get sent out. You’re looking at then the details of the position itself, you know, the hiring manager, the job title, the location, all that type of stuff.

Now, here’s what the template looks like when it gets sent out. And the point of the little blue squares is, all that’s doing is it’s just making the illustration that it’s pulling specific fields from Talent and bringing those into this template. So that then that template goes out, it’s brought in all the right dynamic information from Talent. It’s working off of a Boilerplate. So it combines those things, sends it out. You can create a cover letter. You can create an expiration date. You can create, if you did have any required documentation back and you wanted to attach it, you could do that. And then you can set a signature method. So you do that.

And the one thing that I’m gonna show, and this is a little bit of an extra step, you only have to do this once, is hey, if just in case the hiring manager hasn’t connected their Adobe Sign account with their Talent account, that is a very simple process that is a one-time process, not every time. And so you essentially just need to create your email address, your password, and you sign in. You can do that through an Adobe ID. You can do that through Google. There’s federated IDs. There’s lots of different ways to make this connection. And then it’s just a, you know, confirming that you’re allowing access to your Talent account. Yeah, let’s do it. And so then you’re ready to go. So you’ve got that set. And now you’re ready to send the offer.

So you go to the top. Hit the send to candidate. And again, it’s on the Ribbon, so very, very, you know, convenient UI. You see your cover letter there as well. And so you’re sending it to the candidate. And there it goes. And the candidate, then can…again, this is where it gets really, really simple, is that the candidate just needs a device and a browser. So they might be at their desk. They might be out of the office. Either way, as long as they have their device with them and a connection, it’s very, very simple. So an email comes in. They see that email as a new one. Here’s the offer with the cover letter. And you can see that it’s actually using a template, a Talent created template, and sending that out. And so it’s asking the candidate to sign in. And the candidate can do that in a number of ways. You know, they may not have that employee account yet. And so they’re using a personal account. They’re gonna review the offer. And so this is just gonna put them into a separate window.

So they get into the separate window, and they see that exact, you know, what we were looking at earlier, where it was showing the dynamic fields coming in. This is essentially what they get. And all they need to do is click to sign. Now, they can do that in a number of ways. And I’ll pause on this just for one sec. You can type right here. That’s definitely a way to do it. You know, you can draw or have an image file that you rely on, or you can use your mobile device and do it like a finger signing there. So that’s the choice that’s gonna be made here. Enter the phone number. It’s sent. Hit close. And so now, he moves to the mobile device, and he sees this message, you know, saying, “Tap the above linked to create your signature.” This is an SMS message, hits that. And now it’s that process of, you know, just put your finger on the window of your device, turn it sideways, make the screen bigger, put that signature in there, and you’re essentially done at this point. So he’s applying. And then that’s it. The signature is there. Hits click to sign. You get an acknowledgment. You can download a copy, but you will also get emailed a copy. And, of course, the same thing happens to the hiring manager on the other end of this. Okay, congratulations. We’re done.

Now, what we didn’t take time to do today. And I’m gonna pause for one second instead of going on. We did not show SharePoint office where if any of you wants to get that same feel, then let your Encore representative know. And that’s definitely something that we can just…you know, for any specific customer interest with your Encore rep, you know, we can give you an example of that. I’m gonna pause for one sec before I go any further, are there any questions that have been entered? I can’t see that.

Melissa: Yes, there have been a few questions. I can read those out if you wanna address those.

Todd: Yeah, that’d be great.

Melissa: Sure. Okay. Well, one was just will there be slides made available, and I will be sending a recording to everyone. So that’s an easy one. So next, have you explored how this will synergize with Microsoft Teams that Microsoft is currently rolling out?

Todd: Yes. First of all, that is an integration that we already have. Second of all, I know they’re going to be evolving it and are evolving it now. And so when you look within those workflows…and actually, maybe that’s one thing that we could do as a side action, is that when you think of going into those core strings [SP] and Kimberly and I within our own team at Adobe, were using Teams for…you know, some of it is communication. A lot of it is collaborating on files. That’s probably the main…our main use case. But that collaboration of files and then getting done with an update, and being able to go into that like files component of teams and say, “Oh, okay, great. This one’s ready,” and send for signature right from there. That is absolutely something that we are all over.

Kimberly: And just to continue off of the last point there. We have a very close relationship with Microsoft. So, any sort of application and business application that they currently have within the Office 365, Dynamics, SharePoint, we work closely with them to make sure that Adobe Sign is integrated with that. Do you have more questions?

Melissa: Yeah. There’s a couple more here. So does your Document Cloud utilize any blockchain features?

Todd: Not that I am aware of. However, that’s one of those that if we don’t…we should take a note. And it’d be good to, you know, make sure that we’re not missing something there. But I think a lot of the things that have come up have been either a governmental drive or an industry drive around an encryption or a dual factor authentication, things of that nature. Where it has been or if it has been blockchains specifically, I am not aware of that. So just to do that question like justice, I think we should just do an additional check, get the answer back to the organizers, and then you can get it out.

Melissa: That sounds good. Okay, one more. Is there a feature that allows me to certify the signature used to verify the signature isn’t forged?

Todd: Yeah. There are a few different like standards around certification that they might pertain to…they were either something that was driven by a certain industry or things like that. And there’s a slide. I’m gonna step ahead for one second. When everybody receives the presentation, put it into slide mode. And we sort of…we did this little exercise of anticipating questions. One of the questions that comes up is, “Okay. Well, I need to understand this whole e-signature space better. Number one, is it legal? But then number two, is there another requirement around authentication, like two-factor or certification that my industry or I just personally with my company want?” And so there’s two links. One is to “E-Signature Law” handbook, which is looking at evolving standards. The second is Adobe Trust Center. And this one really talks about everything that we’re doing and the encryption around documents. And so, these are good resources to get into different kinds of either certifications authentications that we use. And so that’s a resource that everybody will have.

Melissa: That’s it for questions right now. Thanks.

Todd: Okay. Then a couple more really quick would be what about, you know, a company that might say, or even the people who are viewing this that might say, “You know what? Do I really, really need to do this?” Well, I hope that, you know, you may have a current process but it’s true. It does give you everything that you need. And heaven forbid that you might not be looking to go digital, but that could be the case. And, you know, the one thing that I would say is that if you’re not taking advantage of digital workflows, and electronic signature capabilities, then your competitors probably are. And it’s just really important when you think of your whole environment, and you look around, and you look at that industry that you work within, and the competition and think, “You know what? This is a way for me to gain competitive advantage if I can take advantage of both what Microsoft and Adobe are doing together to create these workflows.”

Kimberly: I’m gonna also speak to this as well. I am president of a nonprofit in the Bay Area, and I am working or have been working with my accountant on our taxes. And I received information, or I needed to obviously have a signature for my taxes and some other financial things. And I couldn’t sign. I couldn’t do an e-signature. And I have to tell you, I was really irritated because I’m a busy woman. I’ve got things to do, I’ve got places to go, and I wanna be able to have the ease of use, do it quickly and move on. But the process of printing it out, signing it, scanning it…

Todd: Scanning it, yeah, crazy.

Kimberly: …sending it back, wondering going back and forth, did you get it? Did you get it? It made me say, “I think it’s time for me to look for a new accountant.” So just that one instance, that whole…instead of it being a one-day thing, or even two days, it turned into a week. And now I’m in the process of looking for a new accountant, which by the way, I forgot to tell you this. I actually saw a win with my accountant.

Todd: Excellent.

Kimberly: So I might change my mind. But, yeah…

Todd: Perfect, perfect.

Kimberly: …that was something that me as a client said, “I’m not willing to deal with this any longer.”

Todd: Okay. And then one last one, which is, you know, if somebody…if any of you who are attending this are using a competitive solution, or evaluating a competitive solution, certainly the one that we hear a lot about is DocuSign. So this may or may not…it could be that nobody, like, has any question around this. But just in case, you know, what might be important for you is understanding the difference between what DocuSign and Adobe Sign do. Here is the most important answer, particularly for this audience that is invested in the Microsoft cloud application, productivity application sort of ecosystem, is that, you know, we are the preferred e-signature solution for Microsoft customers. And the experience that we were just looking at, not just for our D365 for Sales and D365 for Talent that we were just looking at, but really looking then across that broader set of the combination of SharePoint, Office 365 productivity apps, and even Teams, like somebody asked about. The point of this is that we will be working and have already achieved significant work to make the customer experience just that much more seamless and that much easier. So it’s not that they’re…you know, both companies have a lot of capability. But what we’re trying to do is just get that extra advantage through the integration partnerships that we have to make that experience that much better. It’s a complete digital document solution, many, many turnkey integrations, and again, easier faster signing experience.

And then the last thing is that Adobe is a very, very profitable, stable company that has a very robust R&D budget. And again, a very…that R&D budget and that app development is going to include more and more integrations with Microsoft, and a better and better customer experience that we can provide over time, that truly is differentiated. You know, we mentioned those examples of, “Hey, are we all the way across every single D365, you know, app? Are we all the way across, you know, different sort of…you know, like the FO sides sort of getting over to ERP a little bit?” No, we’re not quite there. But are we gonna create those experiences that are as much knitted into those applications as we were just looking at with D365 for Sales? Yes, absolutely. We are working towards that.

Okay. We’re gonna close it. And the thing to say to close it and the top reasons to choose Adobe and Adobe Sign is again, it’s a…you know, we’re a trusted and global leader in secure digital documents. We will continue to create breakthrough experiences, and we will continue to do things that can really transform the way that you do your work. And we’re very, very excited about that. We will do that, though, in a way where every consideration for security, privacy, compliance, and continuing to work with evolving standards on those fronts because we know that they’ll happen. You know, we evolved… A lot of us have lived through the experience of the GDPR customer data privacy updates. Those are things that we get way, way ahead of. And the same thing will be true on evolving security standards as well. And then the last thing is, you know, we are enterprise ready. And the idea here is that, you know, we will partner to make sure that deployments are successful, that integrations are working, and that adoption among your company and the key people who will be using this, that they are successful, and that they can then really start to realize the benefits of this going forward. So that’s what we had.

Melissa: We had one more question come in if you wanted to…

Todd: Yeah, absolutely.

Kimberly: Can I read that out? Okay.

Todd: Absolutely.

Melissa: So, can I create a task in Outlook to have an Adobe document reviewed and approved, and I want a signature on the document to complete the task? Is this a scenario you have considered? Because I’ve asked the Microsoft Team presenters to allow tasks to be added to the chat thread in Microsoft Teams. I have a case to have documents signed in real-time to support oil and gas vendors. It sounds a bit of a mouthful. Did you get all that?

Todd: I’m gonna take my best shot at it, and if I didn’t hit a nuance, then let me know. But out of Outlook, you can ad hoc signatures where you may not be relying on a template. You may just have a Word document that is there. And you can literally do, you know, a creation on the fly, where you can drag and drop elements and configure a document to do sequential approvals without having it be something where you did a data mapping integration. You can just take a living document. You can be in Outlook, you know, maybe a customer or a partner or an internal person. That might be more the example that you’re referring to here. You know, says, “Hey, you know, we need to take this through a chain that, you know, involves this, this, and this person.” And, yes, you can create those live essentially.

So you can say I… And you do this, by the way, and I’m sorry, I apologize that we’re not actually showing this, but, you know, you can be in Outlook, and when you have the Adobe Sign integration with Outlook along the right side of your experience, so basically to the…you know, when you think of your messages and the body of the email, to the right of that, a panel appears vertically. So it takes up the right side of the screen. And then you can configure that document right from within Outlook. You can attach the document. You can attach, you know, signature or approval fields to it, but you can also set rules around, “I need to have this person sign first, but then I need a sequential approval, that also then has this second person sign and then this third person sign.” That is all configurable elements that you can add. Let me pause and then were there other points of the question that I didn’t hit? Do you mind, you know, just scanning it and seeing?

Melissa: I think that was everything that you addressed, but we can always take it offline afterwards if needed.

Todd: Yeah. And the same thing for the earlier certification question. You know, we’ll make sure that we’re really hitting those head-on. And so if you feel like it’s worth clarifying, then send that to the moderators. And then they can send it to us, and we’ll make sure we answer more precisely.

Melissa: Great. That was it for questions.

Kimberly: Yay. Well, I’m ready for drawing. Who’s ready for the drawing?

Tracey: Yeah, exactly. We’re very excited about the drawing. We have two winners. The first one is Michael G. Michael G., congratulations, and we’ll make sure that you are sent off that gift card. And the second one is Donna M., so congratulations, both of our winners today.

Kimberly: Yay, Michael and [crosstalk 00:55:16]

Todd: Michael and Donna.

Kimberly: And Donna.

Todd: Congratulations.

Kimberly: Congratulations and thank you for joining us.

Tracey: Great. Well, thank you, Todd and Kimberly. We really appreciate today’s session and super excited. I’m super excited about learning more about it because I know we can use it at Encore a lot more than we have been. So, that’s fantastic.

Kimberly: Yay, welcome.

Todd: That’s great. You’re a partner and a customer.

Tracey: There you go.

Todd: That’s about as good as you can get, love it.

Kimberly: Wonderful. Thank you.

Todd: Have a great day, everybody.

Tracey: Thank you, you as well. Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa: No problem. Thanks, everybody.

Todd: Bye.