Enhance Your Communications & Media Workflow with eSignature Legality in the European Union

How to eSign a document: eSignature licitness for Communications & Media in European Union

JOLENE TAM: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Microsoft Ignite. I'm Jolene, Senior Product Marketing Manager on Microsoft 365. I'm excited to be here to introduce you to SharePoint eSignature, a new offering from the SharePoint premium family. Today, business is done digitally, from document creation and review to approvals and reuse. One of the fastest-growing document transactions is electronic signatures. The signing process should be easy, secure, and within the flow of your business processes. But how do you manage, find, and keep track of business critical documents that require signatures from multiple parties securely and efficiently? With eSignature from Microsoft 365, you can request, sign, and store signatures without disrupting your flow of work and while keeping your signed documents secure and compliant. Your content stays in Microsoft 365 while it's reviewed, signed and post-signed as records. Security and compliance are paramount in this age of digital transformation and AI. SharePoint eSignature keeps your content secure within the Microsoft Trust Boundaries. eSignature and Microsoft simplifies the signing experience so you can stay in your workflows without leaving the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This means greater efficiency and faster turnaround times. To be able to scale at the pace you need, eSignature enables tracking and management of every step of the signing process for real-time visibility and accountability. Let's see how eSignature from Microsoft 365 works in a typical scenario. Contoso Outdoors is a retailer of outdoor adventure and sporting goods. They're working with various suppliers for their big summer collection launch, which is focused this year on sunglass products. Contoso Outdoors has a new primary eyewear supplier, Fabrikam, that they need to get under contract. Daisy from Contoso Outdoors is working with Carlos from Fabrikam, the sunglasses supplier. Contoso Outdoors and Fabrikam have finalized the contract agreement for a new line of eyewear for the launch. Now both parties, Daisy and Carlos, need to sign it. From SharePoint, Daisy opens the PDF of the contract that requires both signatures. She clicks on "Get Signatures", which kicks off the process. Daisy can add multiple recipients by typing in their name if they are internal or their e-mail address if they are external. Daisy adds herself and Carlos. Next, Daisy places signature and date fields for herself and Carlos. She also adds an initials field for Carlos to acknowledge a clause that they discussed recently regarding the shipping requirements. Before sending the signature request, Daisy reviews the details and adds a note in the optional message section to remind Carlos about the clause. She then hit "Send". Once Daisy creates the request, she and Carlos both receive a confirmation e-mail. She can either view the document and add her signature now or wait until after Carlos signs it. Daisy decides to sign the contract now. This brings her to the first signature field. Daisy types in her name and can change the font, then hits "Done". Daisy clicks on the date sign field to add today's date to the contract. She hits the "Submit" button to complete her signing. Daisy can view the document in the Request details in the PDF. In the right-hand pane is a list of all the activities on the request to date. Alternatively, Daisy can access the request from the confirmation e-mail that she receives. Now she waits for Carlos to sign. On Carlos's side, he receives an e-mail from Daisy asking for his signature on the contract to get Fabrikam sunglasses on the shelves at Contoso Outdoors. Clicking on the link in the e-mail takes Carlos to the contract. He hasn't used SharePoint eSignature before, so he needs to read and accept the terms and conditions, then click "Agree". Carlos reviews the contract and all looks good. The signature fields are familiar as well as a helpful "Start" button that Carlos clicks. This brings Carlos to the clause where he can review and then add his initials. Hitting "Done" applies Carlos's initials to the document. Carlos hits "Next", which brings him to the next signature field. Similar to what we saw with Daisy signing, Carlos signs and dates the contract and now he's ready to submit his signature. Carlos gets a confirmation immediately that his signature was successfully added. Daisy, the sender, also receives an e-mail confirmation. In her e-mail is a link where she can navigate to the SharePoint folder where the original PDF is stored. There's a copy of the PDF labeled signed and with the date on it, so she knows that it's the signed copy of the document. When Daisy clicks to open the document, she can view the document with all the signatures. As she scrolls down, she can see a new page with all the activities related to the signature request, proving the integrity of the signing process. This is something that the compliance team will be happy to see. All the signatures were added while keeping the document safely in Microsoft Trust Boundaries, all within their typical workflow. We've now seen the seamless digital signing experience between two parties. In this spirit, you may also want to track all your eSignature requests in one place or invoke a chat conversation related to a document perhaps within Microsoft Teams. Let's hand it over to my colleague, Sesha Mani, who can tell us more. Sesha. SESHA MANI: Thanks, Jolene. Hi there. I'm Sesha, Partner Group Product Manager with Microsoft 365. Yes, signing process and request tracking can both be done right within Microsoft Teams, a platform you spend a lot of time in. Let's take a look. As a Procurement Manager at Contoso, Daisy tracks the progress of her requests in the Approvals app within Microsoft Teams. This includes the documents that she needs to review and sign. She can click on any line item to view a request. If Daisy clicks on review, she can then sign the document as she did previously. If Daisy wants to chat or meet with any suppliers like Carlos in Fabrikam, she can achieve that with one click right within her Team's experience. How cool is that? Now let us switch gears to partner integration scenarios. In addition to eSignature for Microsoft 365, we know that many customers use other eSignature services to sign their documents. I am thrilled to share that customers have an easy way to kick start a signature process from documents that are already in Microsoft 365 using their existing third-party eSignature provider. We are excited to announce our partnerships with and Adobe as our initial third-party eSignature providers. The integration between eSignature for Microsoft 365 and third-party providers allows customers to seamlessly initiate signature requests within their existing workflows and facilitate secure and automatic storage of signed documents in Microsoft 365. With these third-party integrations, you can ensure all your signed documents are stored in Microsoft 365 and take advantage of additional security and compliance policies available in SharePoint and Microsoft 365. In addition, reduce potential avenues for data leaks. Let's go back to the earlier scenario with Daisy from Contoso Outdoors and Carlos from Fabrikam. This time Daisy will select a third-party eSignature service such as Adobe Acrobat Sign or because that's the preferred provider that Contoso already uses company-wide. To start, Daisy opens the PDF document from SharePoint. Once the document opens, Daisy clicks the "Get signatures" button and sees a list of eSignature providers. Aside from eSignature from Microsoft 365, Contoso Outdoors allows Adobe Acrobat Sign and . Let's see both experiences at work, starting with . Daisy selects . She is immediately prompted to confirm if she wants to continue requesting a signature with and she clicks "Okay". She then goes through the web experience to continue the signature request process. To streamline this process, the original PDF has been automatically transferred from SharePoint to . She then adds Carlos' name and e-mail along with an optional note and hits "Next". Finally, Daisy places the signature fields on the document and sends it to Carlos for signing as she normally would in . After Carlos submits his signature, notifies Daisy and Carlos. This helps them stay updated on the document status. When the document has been fully signed by all required parties, Daisy receives an e-mail from Microsoft confirming that a copy of the signed document was saved to SharePoint with an access link to the folder. Clicking the link opens up the SharePoint folder. The document is saved in Signed Documents folder and within a subfolder named , rightfully named with the eSignature provider. This dedicated folder structure allows Daisy to easily track, retrieve, and retain all signed documents. Now let's take a look at the Adobe Acrobat Sign experience. After selecting the Adobe Acrobat Sign option, Daisy immediately prompted to confirm if she wants to continue to Adobe Acrobat Sign. From here, Daisy inputs recipient details and other relevant information. Then she completes the signature request by placing the signature fields on the document and sends it off to Carlos. Adobe then sends all relevant notifications to Daisy and Carlos throughout the process to keep them updated on the progress of the document. When the document has been fully signed by all required parties, Daisy receives an e-mail from Microsoft confirming that a copy of the signed document is saved to SharePoint with an access link to the folder. Clicking the link opens up the SharePoint folder named Signed Documents, and the signed document is saved within a subfolder named Adobe Acrobat Sign. Much like the SharePoint eSignature experience, the Approval app in Teams also shows the documents signed through and Adobe Acrobat Sign. As you have just seen, Microsoft supports third-party eSignature providers that you already used today. We are excited to have and Adobe as our launch partners, and We WILL support additional providers in the future. Now if you're wondering how you can enable this capability in your Microsoft 365 tenant, well, it's a simple few clicks process. In the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, you can enable and configure eSignature at a site level and manage which signature providers are available to your end users. There you have it. We have just walked through our integration with third-party eSignature providers. But we are not stopping with eSignature. We understand most organizations, including users, have high-value documents such as contracts, NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, or SOWs, statement of works, in Microsoft 365 and need to streamline the end-to-end process working with those high-value documents. Within Microsoft Teams, using the new Agreements app, you can create these high value documents from well-defined templates that have built-in eSignature requirements. You can create and manage these templates from your familiar Teams and Word experiences. You can even upload incoming high-value documents like contracts and do advanced AI analysis like classes deviation analysis and so much more. That was a tour of eSignature for Microsoft 365. Keep your signed documents secure and compliant, simplifying your everyday business workflows with SharePoint eSignature. To learn more, check out our Ignite announcement blog post, attend our view on demand, the SharePoint Premium breakout session, and come chat with us at our expert meet up station. If you are ready to get started today, visit aka.ms/eSign. Thank you very much.