Want to learn about the brand new SharePoint eSignature solution? Join Principal Product Manager Sanjoyan Mustafi and myself as we cover what SharePoint eSignature can do today and the roadmap!
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Video Summary
Here are the key points from the video:
- Introduction and Conference Experience: The conversation starts with a live broadcast from the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando. The host, Vlad, welcomes Sanjoyan, who shares his positive experience at the conference, highlighting the vibrant atmosphere and the opportunity to exchange ideas with customers and partners.
- SharePoint eSignature Overview: Sanan introduces the new SharePoint eSignature feature, which allows users to manage eSignatures directly within SharePoint and OneDrive. This integration aims to streamline the process, keeping documents within the Office 365 environment for compliance and governance.
- First-Party and Third-Party Integrations: The discussion covers the seamless integration of SharePoint eSignature with third-party providers like DocuSign and Adobe Sign. Users can choose to use these providers while still benefiting from the document management capabilities of SharePoint.
- Admin Setup and Control: Sanan explains the setup process for admins, including configuring the pay-as-you-go billing model and enabling the eSignature feature for specific SharePoint sites. He also mentions future plans to allow more granular control, such as enabling the feature for specific user groups.
- Roadmap and Licensing: The roadmap for SharePoint eSignature includes upcoming features like integration with Teams approvals, sequential signing, and native integration with Word and Excel. The pricing model is based on a per-request basis, which can be cost-effective for smaller companies with lower volumes of eSignature requests.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Hello everyone, we are live from the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando, and I am here with Sanan Sanjan. How are you doing?
Doing good, thanks for inviting me.
Well, thanks for being here. It’s the second time you’re actually on the channel here on Vlad Talk Tech. The previous webinar we did before was a couple of years ago.
Yes, it was a couple of years ago, but it had over 20,000 views, so people definitely loved you.
Oh, and I’m happy to see you in person now. Last time it was remote, now we’re doing it in person. Always more fun.
Definitely, so much better.
How are you finding the conference so far?
The conference is awesome and absolutely buzzing. I love all the customers and partners visiting in the same place together and exchanging ideas. This is an awesome platform, and we’re learning so much.
Great to have 3,000 people all here at the same time. And you’re a busy person this week. You had what, four sessions?
Three sessions, this, and then we’re doing this thing now, and you’re at the expo hall. Everything. Thank you so much for making time for me.
No worries. One of the sessions you’re presenting is all about SharePoint eSignature, which is quite new. In the past, and you know I’ve been doing SharePoint for a while now, we wanted to have documents in SharePoint, but whenever we needed an eSignature, we had to go to DocuSign or Adobe and have different integrations. We needed a custom solution and everything like that. But now Microsoft is bringing it as a native tool inside. Did this go GA yet, or is it still in preview?
We are GA-ing in specific geographies, starting with North America, because eSignature is always tied to some legal nature. Every geography has its own legal entities and rules and regulations, so we are careful in slowly releasing into Europe, which will be in early 2025.
Early 2025, wow. So in North America, we get it quite a bit in advance. Is it already live?
Yes, it is.
Awesome. Let’s cover a bit because I feel it’s such a new tool and so many companies already have that in place with DocuSign, Adobe, or any of the probably 50-80 other existing vendors. Let’s take 15 minutes and deep dive a bit into eSignature. What can you tell us? Where do you want to get started?
Absolutely. You used two keywords when you described the scenario: integration and partners. This space, to start with, is a huge space. Let me give you some numbers. In North America alone, businesses spend around $100 billion-plus to maintain manual documentation, paper documentation. This is a very big business area. The primary reason we are entering this market is because of integrations and seamless integration. Let me show you on the screen a common experience that you will go through when you are doing an eSignature. At the beginning, you will start by drafting a contract. Generally, you start with a template that you already have or you create a template from scratch. Then you add clauses. For example, you are doing an employment agreement or some other contract with your third-party procurement team. You start with the template and then add specific clauses. Once you review all the changes, at that point in time, you now need to integrate with your third-party vendors, which are Adobe and DocuSign, very popular and high probability your viewers are also using them. The best thing that we are doing as a first-party eSignature provider is to ensure that you do not have to leave the boundary of Office 365. Your documents stay within the boundary of Office 365, where you have all the compliance and governance in place, and still, you are able to invite external entities and collaborate and sign. That’s our main value proposition. The second is the pricing model that we are introducing, which is a per-request pricing model at this point in time versus a per-user per-month pricing model where you get a lock-in. It’s a pay-per-use model for us to begin with, and then we’ll see how the market reacts.
You said you’ll cover it deeper, so I’ll keep my questions for a bit later on licensing.
Sure. As a next step, I would like to show you the four pillars that we are offering before I show you a very quick demo of how we are doing it. The four pillars that we are covering are our first-party offering, as I described, where the document stays within SharePoint and OneDrive and does not need to leave. The second is if you already have investments with large third-party eSignature providers like DocuSign and Adobe, 95% of our user base already has that, so we offer seamless collaboration with your third-party providers by keeping most of the content within SharePoint or bringing the content after signature into SharePoint. We will see a demo of that as well. On the right-hand side, you can see that we are providing native integration with Word, being a very common tool for creating contracts and agreements, so you do not need to leave Word. You can integrate more, as I can show you in my demo as well. The last one, which is not there yet but we are working on, is the Graph API that we are going to expose. These APIs will be metered, so if you are building your application in an organization using Power Automate or some other tooling, you can consume this service natively as well.
Let’s dive into the demo. That’s the most fun part.
I’ll start with our first-party experience. The scenario here is Daisy from Contoso Outdoor is trying to collaborate with Carlos from Fabrikam. Daisy is our procurement manager persona and is sending an eSignature document to Carlos. I’m going to narrate this story of how it works. Daisy’s work starts within SharePoint. She goes to a common SharePoint library and opens up a PDF document. As you see, the document is opened in the browser from the native browser experience. You can now add recipients directly to your PDF document. Daisy adds herself and Carlos. The key here is, if you notice, we are still within the SharePoint web experience. I add my eSignature fields at the appropriate places. I need some dates as well. I have a clause that I added for Carlos. I’m adding my initials column as well. You can add more. We have out-of-the-box 25 such columns, and you can add more to that. She also leaves an optional message so that when Carlos gets the eSignature request, he knows what changes have been made to the original template. The request is now sent. As step one, once Daisy gets the request, this is the real signing step where she is going to first sign the document. She is a signatory to the document, so Daisy goes ahead and signs the document, enters the date, and clicks on submit. Again, within the SharePoint experience. Once the signature is completed by Daisy, she gets a confirmation and can see on the screen that it is waiting for Carlos to sign. Carlos gets the email from Daisy and clicks on view request. Once he does that, Carlos will be taken to a similar experience, but as a step one, he needs to accept the terms and conditions. Once he does that, the same document opens up. Carlos notices that Daisy has already signed the document. He goes ahead and adds his initials, indicating he has read the change in clause, and then puts the final signature and the date. The experience is seamless. If you have done eSignature before, it is very similar, which is good because everybody is already used to it. Now Daisy gets confirmation. She clicks on the folder link in the email, which takes her back to the same location. The file, which is signed, uses a naming convention with the name of the file, the date and time when it is signed, and saves the signed copy. Daisy can go ahead and see that the signature process is complete. On her right, she can see the request history, showing when the document was actually signed. Any questions? How do you like the experience so far?
The experience seems super simple, which I love because I’m really bad at setting those up, so I feel even I can do it. I like that part. Let me now answer your previous question about how to set this up by the admin. In order to do that, let me show you how it looks in the admin center. As step one, in the admin center, you have to set up PAYG. You go to the Azure portal and set up PAYG.
What is that? Not everybody knows what that means.
Thank you so much. I use so many acronyms. PAYG means pay-as-you-go billing, where you need an Azure subscription and attach it to the PAYG or pay-as-you-go billing metering service. When you use the service, as a simple example, suppose you are uploading a file, and if it is metered, the number of times you do an activity ticks the meter, and then you get a bill or receipt at the end of the month. This is that service, and many other Syntex features use that. Syntex, which is now SharePoint Premium, is one of the tools that got renamed a few times. It takes a while until it’s everywhere in the admin center.
I accept that feedback. Yes, we did change this naming convention a couple of times. So if your users are using this today, they will see this branding in place. However, it will change soon to “sh.” This is on the admin side. We’re used to it on the admin side, so it doesn’t matter as much. We know what it is. This is not only for e-signature, right? When we configure this, we configure “pay as you go” for the whole show print premium functionality, right? Okay, true. Once you have set up the pay, the second tab on your right is turned on, which is “Manage Microsoft Syntax.” The branding will change, but if you go inside that tab now, it shows you all the available services. As an admin, you can control what you can turn on. Awesome. So if we just want e-signature and don’t want any of that RI stuff, I can just have e-signature? Yes, awesome. You have more granularity. If you click on e-signature, you can turn it on, but you can also publish this ability to a selected set of SharePoint sites. Cool. Okay, let’s see how it is done. You click on the “Select Sites” option, and that takes you to a selection screen. You can manually add up to 100 sites, or if you have a simple CSV file or an Excel list with a bunch of sites, you can just upload it. As an admin, we always love CSV and PowerShell, so that’s awesome. Great. Correct. Now, this is the setup process. You set up your metering service with your subscription, turn on e-signature, and then publish it to sites where this ability is now available to common users. It’s SharePoint and/or OneDrive for Business, right? Or is it only SharePoint? Very good question. At this point in time, this is only for SharePoint. We are considering bringing this to OneDrive as well in the future. Okay, awesome. That answers your question, Vlad, about how to turn on this facility for users. The third thing I would like to show you is if you have your investments already with Adobe and DocuSign, and you are working with them, you can still use the EXP end-user experience. However, in the end, you can still use them as your main service provider. For that, we do not charge because we are just a pass-through. Your meter will not be ticked for that. Of course, I can have all the benefits of still having the files in SharePoint. You mentioned signed files going automatically to SharePoint. Yes, and you don’t pay anything to Microsoft if you are using the signature service with DocuSign. That would be amazing. Double billing, we don’t do that. That’s amazing. Let me show you an example of how the entire integration works for a customer who already has DocuSign. I’ll show you how the integration works. The scenario is still the same. Daisy starts the initiative. I’ll pause here to show you, Vlad. Since we went to the admin portal and enabled the service and added the third-party service providers, they will show up under this panel. In my first demo, it only showed e-signature under Microsoft. This happens once you enable the e-sign process in the admin portal. In this example, she chooses DocuSign. Once you make the choice, you need to sign into DocuSign. You go through the signing process. I had to upload the document to that service provider, so the Contoso agreement document has to be physically uploaded. It has left the trust boundary and landed outside your trust boundary. From that point onwards, the process is similar. Inside DocuSign, you add the fields and columns. I did not take you through the entire process. You get this signed, and you get the email back. Once everything happens, we create a folder. I’ll pause to show you, Vlad. My files were inside the documents folder on the SharePoint site. We create a folder called “Apps Signed Documents” and then one for each external vendor. In my example, I used DocuSign, so a folder called DocuSign is created, and the signed document is brought back seamlessly. When we worked with large customers to understand their cases, like the legal department inside Microsoft, this is a huge win. Today, people write custom workflows, or the process is entirely painful and manual, where they need to manually bring back documents and save them back to SharePoint. If they miss it, their most important e-sign documents are out of their control. They lost track and don’t know where it is. Plus, you are aware of retention policies and legal liabilities. You need to maintain and keep this document for, let’s say, seven years in the banking industry. All these are by default compliant. Can I apply SharePoint Premium? Can I do an extraction in this library after? Thank you for asking. This is one of our major use cases. When the signed document comes in, since the metering service is turned on, you can use autofill to extract content and automatically populate all the relevant metadata. That’s awesome. Not only do I have my document in SharePoint, but all the boring part of manually setting metadata is done for me. Absolutely. I love that part. Maybe another question for you. I come from an admin world. Can I set what users in my tenant? I know you said we can set it to certain sites. Can I also only allow certain users from a security group, or is it only at the site level? Is my only admin control at present for e-signature only at the site level? What we found out is that not everybody in the company works in the e-signing experience. There are departments like sales, procurement, HR, or legal. They pretty much know where their documents are or should be, and they control that. The big worry a lot of organizations have with pay-as-you-go is what happens if somebody’s having fun trying things. You pay per usage. What happens if Vlad goes in and tries it 10 or 20 times? That’s why I was asking the question. You have a very valid point. We do not have that granularity. We have received that feedback from several customers, so we plan to build it. Of course, it’s just when GA, so it’s always going to improve. Are you ready for the licensing talk? Yes. Are you ready? I know licensing is always a different beast. Did you want to share something else before? I’ll do one quick section on the roadmap, and then we’ll do the licensing. This is my licensing slide. You can read and ask me a question. Let’s see on the roadmap. Available now, February 2024, for signing documents, declining to sign, cancelling a request, email notifications, and activity. Coming in June, integration with approvals in Teams, Adobe Sign and DocuSign integrations, and availability in the UK, Ireland, and Canada. I’m a tiny bit biased, but I’m happy. In only one month, I’ll be able to use it in my tenant. Yes. We are starting with North America, expanding to bigger markets like the UK, Ireland, and then Canada, followed by Europe. We are starting small capability-wise because Adobe Sign and other players are very mature in this market. We are starting with basic capabilities and then maturing. For example, in June, we are bringing sequential signing, where you can enforce that signing has to happen in a specific order. This is an important scenario for our customers. The person who sent the signature in the first demo was the first one to sign, but a lot of times, if I want you to sign something, I’ll wait for you to sign it, and then I do the final signature. Today, as recorded, it’s not available, but it will be available in only a month. Very soon. Awesome. Let’s see what’s coming beyond June. Beyond June through the end of this year, we are bringing native integration in Word and Excel. Our customers told us that this is the most common medium for creating contracts and agreements. You will get a “Get Signature” button within Word, and you can start the process from there. Admins will be able to publish this capability to specific groups, like the legal group so that enthusiastic users don’t run signatures for everybody and tick the bill. Power Automate integration and API integration are also coming. Many customers want to automate the process, like legal firms and construction companies that generate contracts a lot. Giving them ways to automate that is our next priority. One of the questions I had for you is about metadata. Last year, I bought a house, and it was all electronic with a lot of paperwork and e-signatures. They used a weird signature service I never heard about. I learned that in some use cases, like in Quebec real estate, you need the signature provider to have the location by IP and multi-factor authentication. Right now, what kind of metadata do I get when I send you to sign a document? Do I know the location where you signed it? Do I know if it was from a phone? What kind of metadata do I get as your external signer? As of now, we store three pieces of information: location, device (whether you are signing from a handheld device or a desktop), and the type of browser or native app. We are working on more rich metadata extraction for admins so that you know the document has been signed by the expected person. Good question.
Now, let’s go to licensing. So, you use the licensing for SharePoint eSignature, which is $2 per request created. That is not $2 per completed signature. No, that’s a very different word there because if I send you five, let’s say I create a document and send it to you for signature, and you’re like, “You know what, I don’t like that clause,” and then you decline it or I cancel it and send it to you again, and you tell me, “I don’t like that point either,” and I make the change, I still pay every time I send you a request. So basically, make sure you agree with the person before you send it to avoid paying extra. Yes, it is a per-request pricing model at this point in time. As I also said, if you notice the way I have put it, it is only for the SharePoint eSignature first-party offering. If you are working on integrating with your existing third-party provider, then you still need to go to the Azure API service and turn on the metering for Syntex. However, the meter will not tick because your request is served by a third-party provider. That’s awesome. Look, I never had to purchase DocuSign or Adobe Sign, so I don’t know the prices. Maybe I should have checked them before starting this video, but how does the pricing of Microsoft compare to other third-party services? That’s a good question. It really depends on the volume. The API service, where I charge you per request completed, is good until it goes to a certain number. Then, let’s say an external vendor is charging you per person per month $100. Even if you don’t use the service a single time, you are going to pay that much money at the end of the month for the entire year. If you want to get some discounts, you generally do a bigger annual contract. This one is beneficial if your volume is low and if you’re not using that many requests. However, if you’re doing a large amount, then it is still beneficial to work with your big service providers like DocuSign and Adobe. For me, as a smaller company, I love this because I maybe send one a month, so this is perfect for me. But still, because of that third-party integration, there’s no reason why a company in the US today should not enable it and start using all those custom workflows. Why has it custom when you can have it first-party managed by Microsoft and get all that data back in SharePoint? That is amazing. Yes, that is exactly the purpose of this. If you are a large enterprise and you are using DocuSign, Adobe, or any other service providers, you should continue with your initiative if you feel comfortable.
Wait to use it, but so one more month of waiting in Canada. I’ll start by creating a SharePoint site with a countdown timer on it until it’s available in Canada. But thank you so much for taking the time and showing me all those things and answering all my tough questions. Hopefully, they weren’t too tough. I always enjoy talking with you. It’s been amazing, and I think this will be something that will be super popular among enterprises. I’ve seen more and more companies starting with services here, there, and everywhere. Then the admins are like, “Okay, now I need to manage compliance, retention, everything in 10 different apps with 10 different UUD logs whenever I need it,” and they go crazy or rely on their end user, which is even more risky. Yes, because you know every end user buys the enterprise subscription with MFA and compliance—they all do that. So, it’s amazing to see a lot more of those things coming directly to Microsoft and making our lives as admins easier. I can’t wait to try it again in one month. As soon as it’s available in Canada, I’m telling you, on day one, I’ll send you a screenshot that I tried it, or I might send you an e-signature to your email. You’re going to get a contract from Vlad, and you’re going to be like, “Wait, what?” But thank you so much again for taking the time. For everybody else, I really hope you have enjoyed this video. Please make sure you like it, and if you’d like to see Sanjan join us for more in-depth videos like this, please put it in the comments. This way, I can bribe him and convince him later to do more videos with me. Thank you so much for watching, everyone, and I really hope you enjoyed it.
