ShareMethods and EchoSign Integration via Simple Ajax Mashup

At the Office 2.0 Conference in October, I had the pleasure of meeting EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin. Jason participated in a panel which I led at the conference titled “Collaborative Document Management” (the panel also included the team leader for Google Docs and Spreadsheets among others).

  EchoSign is a prototypical Office 2.0 service; it is focused on streamlining the workflow of signing contracts. The service is fast and easy to use while tackling an important business problem most people have to address on a daily basis – getting signatures needed for sales contracts quickly and easily, etc. As we all know, this process is often slow, error-prone, and riddled with struggles of lost paperwork, etc. EchoSign won “Best of Show” at the Office 2.0 Conference for this innovation, a significant honor for this industry event.

After the conference we decided to sign up for EchoSign. At ShareMethods, we have our own business need to streamline the process of contract signing especially as we have been acquiring more new customers. And so, we tested EchoSign and found it worked well for contract signing. Indeed, after Dreamforce 2006, we had our shortest sales cycle ever – we signed up a new customer in just three business days.  A demo for the prospect on a Thursday was followed by a signed contract on a Monday – and we used EchoSign to streamline the contract signing process for this dramatically fast sales cycle. EchoSign worked great and we have used EchoSign for both written and electronic signatures.

Given our positive experience with EchoSign, we started to explore how we might extend this functionality to our prospects and customers most of whom are working with sales contracts on a regular basis. And so we turned to our new developments with webDAV and Simple Ajax Mashup (see previous posts on this blog). Using these two technologies we were able to browse and select contract and agreement documents from ShareMethods via the EchoSign application.  A screen shot is linked to the thumbnail below which shows ShareMethods on-demand documents accessible to EchoSign.

 

These documents could then move through the EchoSign document signing automation process. Once the document(s) are signed by all parties, a PDF of the counter-signed contract is available. We were then able to save the contract from EchoSign back into ShareMethods. This easy integration is one example of the power of Office 2.0 services working together to streamline common user workflows – in this case further extending the value proposition of each service, dellivering value that is greater than the sum of its parts. This type of interoperability across Office 2.0 services will become increasingly important in 2007 and beyond. We are excited to be able to pioneer this work with the EchoSign service. A screen shot is linked to the thumbnail below which shows the countersigned PDF document generated by EchoSign being saved into ShareMethods on-demand document repository. This is really powerful. Also, this is just the beginning…

Note: ShareMethods now supports webDAV in its production service. A mini desktop app that enables desktop integration for drag and drop, offline sync, and integration with services like EchoSign as described above is available now on a limited basis to ShareMethods prospects and customers upon request. This app will be made more broadly available n Q1 2007.