Create-Send-Sign – as Easy as 1-2-3…

One of the most common and important business processes in the world is the signing of contracts. Companies spend alot of time coming up with great ideas; selling, marketing, and building those great ideas into products and services; and as a crucial last step, customers need to sign contracts. But getting a contract signed is far from easy – the process is often time consuming, cumbersome, complex, and error prone.

But now, there is a better way. And the better way is not just for contracts, it can be used for documents important to any sales process including proposals, quotes, invoices, customer letters, and more. We call it “Create-Send-Sign” and indeed its as easy as 1-2-3.

The idea is to have a simple online wizard which guides a user through the process of creating, sending, and signing a document, where the process is as follows:

• Create: Documents can be based on common templates such as contracts, proposals, etc. A user selects a template and customer data is automatically inserted to create an online document. A user can edit the document if needed or go straight to final output. Once the document is ready, it is saved as a PDF, and it can be previewed to check for accuracy and quality.
• Send: Once the document has been created, edited (if needed), previewed, and saved, it can be emailed to a prospect or customer. The email along with a link to the document is saved into an activity history so there is an audit trail for sending the document. Emailing a document would be appropriate for a sales proposal or an invoice as examples.
• Sign: If a signature is needed, a user can send a document for electronic signing or written signature. In the case of e-signing, the recipient and sender complete the e-signing process completely via email. For written signatures, the document is sent to a recipient who signs it and returns the document via a 1-800 fax number. The 1-800 fax number ensures the document is scanned and digitized with final signed copies emailed to all parties. At any time, it is possible to check the document signing status

A screen shot is available by clicking on the thumbnail below, which illustrates the Create-Send-Sign wizard with an online editor showing the online document.

From a business perspective, the Create-Send-Sign feature can be hugely valuable to any user that needs to quickly and easily create documents online for sending or signing. Time can be reduced in a sales process to complete a contract signing, revenues can be delivered more quickly, staff time can be reduced by having a quick way to generate these documents, and accuracy is increased through standardization of templates and automatic inclusion of customer data. Its a big, big win for everyone involved. If this sounds good to you, install ShareOffice right now from the salesforce.com AppExchange.

From a technical perspective, there is alot of complexity under the hood. This solution integrates ShareMethods, salesforce.com, EchoSign, and iNetWord into a seamless user experience and a special thanks to all of our partners who supported us in making this happen. The solution leverages the power of OpenSAM, an open standard for online app integration, as well as the Force.com and EchoSign web services APIs. Its a great example of the power of web architecture to make life simple and easy for a user, delivering many benefits, on-demand. We are very excited about the importance of this new capability and delivering it into the marketplace. We invite you to check it out and roll it out across your organization so that Create-Send-Sign can be as easy as 1-2-3.

More Power for Team and Partner Portals

This week, ShareMethods rolled out a set of long awaited and frequently requested features for team and partner portals. Many of our customers and prospects have asked us for the ability to send branded email notifications to their internal teams, business partners, prospects, and customers. Likewise we have been asked to add an ability for branded login pages and branded domain names too. Well, after a bunch of hard work, these features have arrived and we are excited about it. ShareMethods customers can now configure a branded email notification by uploading images for header and footer areas of a branded HTML email message. Images can be uploaded as PNG, GIF, or JPEG. Users can also modify the text that goes out to new users so that it is company or brand specific. A screen shot of the branded email configuration page is shown below:

Once a new graphic has been added for the header and footer of the email notification, all users who receive an email notification will see the branded emails. A simple example is below where an “Acme Company” logo is at the top of the message and a “Big Brand, Inc.” logo is at the bottom, with email text and document links in the center.  As of this release, the email notifications are supported in MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, Google’s Gmail, and Yahoo! mail; this covers many hundreds of millions of email users and we will be working to add support for additional desktop and web mail clients in the coming months.

 

In addition to the branded email configuration and end-user feature, ShareMethods has added the ability for a customer to have a branded domain name (i.e., www.sharemethods.net/acmecompany) and a branded login page. You can check out the branded login page and we also have a screen shot shown below:

And so, with branded emails, branded login pages, and branded domain names, its a whole new capability for deploying team and partner portals with ShareMethods. We are putting you more and more in the driver’s seat to deliver your content and documents to your internal staff, partners, prospects, and customers with your company’s brand front and center. We hope you like these new features – be sure to let us know your feedback and how we can make these features even better.

Emerging Standards for Mashups and The OpenSAM Community

ZDNet posted a great article called “Standards Support for Mashups Emerge” (by Dion Hinchliffe). The article takes a look at the landscape of standards for mashups including OpenSocial, OpenSAM, OpenFriend, S-Mash, OpenAjax, OpenID, DataPortability.org, etc. remarking about the value of such standards to interconnect online applications. He also focuses in on OpenSAM as one of the best standards to emerge for mashups as follows:

• But the most comprehensive and detailed plan for bringing standard approaches and techniques to mashups has to be OpenSAM, which leverages many existing standards such as WebDAV, openid, LDAP, and also subscribes to DataPortability.org’s standards to create a consistent and well-organized design and interaction model for offering complex, heterogeneous mashups to both the consumer and business community. Even more importantly, they cite a good number of companies already offering Web applications that support OpenSAM. The OpenSAM vision is broad and focused across the usage spectrum and the OpenSAM folks say that “once OpenSAM is added to an application, it can immediately join mashups with all other OpenSAM applications.”

and also:

• OpenSAM. A comprehensive and sophisticated set of standards and documented practices for creating mashups. OpenSAM is very advanced in that it support a wide range mashup capabilities including discovery, provisioning, branding, identity, workflow, document storage, meta-data and more. OpenSAM lists a number of existing products that implement it today and it also provides many of the look and feel standards that many users will find helpful as they encounter more and more applications built on a mashup approach.

We are honored to see this type of recognition for OpenSAM and it is a validation for all of the hard work from the participants.  We look forward to expanding upon the groundwork and taking OpenSAM to new levels of utility for the industry.

The OpenSAM consortium of which ShareMethods is a co-founder has also launched a community forum in Google Groups. Check it out at http://groups.google.com/group/opensam. If you are a member or prospective member of OpenSAM, please join the OpenSAM group. Listen to our ideas, share your suggestions, and help to make OpenSAM as powerul as possible. Currently, in a project with OpenSAM members, we are exploring ways in which to have a slimmed down version of OpenSAM to make it very easy to connect apps in just a few hours, a starting point from which applications can expand to richer functionality as home and productivity apps. We are also exploring the possibility of adding multimedia apps to the existing categories of home and productivity apps and looking at linkages with existing data standard initiatives such as DataPortability.org. In eveny event, please check out the OpenSAM community and if you like it, please sign up and participate.