Adobe today announced a series of new Document Cloud features, together with relevant Marketing Cloud integrations. Among the announcements were the launch of Adobe Sign for digital signatures, integrated with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms, and a partnership to connect Document Cloud workflows with Box.
I spoke with Jessica Waters Davis, Group Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Document Cloud, prior to the release. Davis described the moves as underlining the message that “digital transformation is a business imperative.” Adobe Document Cloud was launched a year ago, but “80 percent of business processes still rely on paper,” she said. The launch of Adobe Sign (in part a re-branding of the Document Cloud eSign tool), and the Box workflow partnership each support entirely paperless document operations.
Adobe Sign is intended to allow businesses to go fully paperless with forms like credit card applications, easing the pain of enrolling customers, and–as I saw in a demonstration–allowing transactions to be commenced,paused, continued and completed across a series of devices, without ever exiting the digital environment. Adobe Sign allows users to send and receive signed documents via web and mobile applications, and it integrates with Adobe Marketing Cloud’s AEM Forms solution to ease onboarding, and make form-based processes easier to handle “across the entire customer journey,” Davis said. It also, she said, “helps to fix an abandonment rate which can be as high as 70 percent” when processes call for customers to abandon the digital environment and turn to emails and faxes to complete transactions.
Both Adobe Sign and Adobe Document Cloud will integrate with the Box business collaboration tool to facilitate management of the roughly two billions pdfs currently stored in Box. Users will be able to open pdfs in Box directly using Acrobat DC and have changes saved to Box in real time. Users will also be able to open Box files in Adobe Sign to add eSignatures. Again, updates will be saved directly to Box. These integrations are aimed at eliminating the need for downloads and transfers and the risks of creating multiple drafts. A similar integration was announced with Microsoft OneDrive.
With six billion digital signature transactions taking place per year, Davis hopes the new Adobe Sign will become “the de facto standard for the way the world signs everything.” The significance for marketing and sales is the prospect–still far from achieved–of 100 percent digital enrollment and onboarding.
Adobe Sign capabilities should be available during May, and the ability to add a Box account to Acrobat DC and Reader for desktop by the end of May.
