Maximize Your SharePoint Investment with E-Signatures

You’ll be paperless. Or will you?

It’s a promise many enterprises make to themselves. 

Why?

Because paper kinda slows you down: HR, your customers, your vendors, compliance, engineering specks. All experience setbacks when glued to paper processes.

“In business there is a big problem, and that problem is the paper problem,” Rahim Kaba, director of product marketing for e-SignLive by Silanis, a Montreal, Quebec provider, said during a recent CMSWire webinar. “Information is often stored on paper in a typical business. Most of the world still stores files in file cabinets. The paper problem is everywhere, across every department and every business.”

Kaba said during the webinar that his company can solve that problem with its e-signature technology add-on for SharePoint. (You can watch the full webinar at the end of this story.)

SharePoint Success

Many organizations migrate to SharePoint to manage documents, store information and collaborate. But even so, all processes for those organizations may not be fully digital.

“They fall to paper whenever a signature or approval is needed,” Kaba said. “These systems break down whenever signatures are required. By taking a small step to add e-signatures to SharePoint or other business apps you can take a big step forward in going digital.”

Who benefits?

• Sales, which processes orders and on-boards customers
• Internal departments, such as HR, which can use e-signatures for new-hire paperwork when implementing an end-to-end digital workflow
• Customers getting a seamless experience
• Vendors signing contracts

It can be daunting for organizations to jump onto e-signature technology, Kaba admitted.

What’s first? Identify primary use cases, such as sales, procurement and IT.

“If you’re leading the digital charge at your organization, most of the people you’re involved with instantly see the value of what you are doing,” Kaba said. “But when it comes to executing it can get a little tricky. Many orgs are set in their ways and don’t embrace change easily.”

Help your stakeholders make the move by identifying which processes hold back efficiencies. Map before and after workflows. Define requirements based on use cases and workflows.

“Start putting together a shortlist of providers to meet your specific needs,” he said.

Keep it Personal

Although the e-SignLive technology will be prevalent in your back-end, Kaba insisted organization will be able to maintain brand identity.

“You don’t want to lose that personal touch,” he said. “Our e-signature solution enables you to keep your brand front and center and you can customize your whole user interface. You’re establishing trust between you and your stakeholders. You want consistent experiences across all touch points, a key driver of that trust.”

Kaba said a key aspect of the e-SignLive tech is its “out of the box” functionality. It’s built inside SharePoint for customers and requires no integration work. Users can track the progress of electronic transactions, archive important documents inside of SharePoint for retention purposes and automate future transactions.

Users can store documents as future templates for repeated use.

“This keeps your business moving,” Kaba said, “and keeps your projects on track. This allows you to maximize your SharePoint investment and enhances the power of SharePoint by adding e-signatures to SharePoint workflows.”

 Title image by WordRidden.