Announcing the DocuSign Agreement Cloud: 2021 Release 1

In the DocuSign Agreement Cloud: 2021 Release 1, we have exciting new product capabilities to help you keep your business moving forward. Here’s DocuSign’s SVP of Engineering Tom Casey to introduce his favorites from Release 1:

Read on for more information on all of the capabilities in this release.

New features in DocuSign eSignature

Agreements are everywhere, from sales contracts and offer letters to invoices and NDAs. That’s why over 750,000 customers use eSignature, the world’s #1 electronic signature solution. We’re thrilled to help our customers save time and money while providing an intuitive signing experience on any device, virtually anywhere.

In this release, we’ve listened to top customer requests to deliver new features for eSignature:

• Signing Insights is a data visualization tool that helps your admins better understand signer behavior to turn data into action. For example, an admin can see that a certain template’s signers have an unusually high drop-off rate. The admin can then focus on improving the template’s usability to increase completion rates.  
• Data Verification enables verification of signer information you need to complete agreements. You can connect eSignature with a validation service such as Plaid or a credit reporting bureau, check the signer’s personal or account information, and validate during the signing session. This real-time verification speeds up business process, improves the customer experience and reduces risk of errors.
• With eSignature for Microsoft Teams, users can get real-time notifications on agreements from directly within Teams. This eliminates the need to switch between apps, boosting productivity and accelerating the completion of agreements. We are targeting general availability of this feature for early April.
• eWitness allows signers to include up to two witnesses per signer in the signing process, which may be a requirement for high value transactions and deeds in certain regions (e.g., the United Kingdom and Australia). With the latest eWitness updates, customers now have the option to add two-factor authentication via SMS to verify the identity of the person witnessing the signature. We are targeting general availability of this feature for early April.

New features in DocuSign CLM

In the Agreement Cloud: 2020 Release 3, we announced CLM+, which adds AI-driven contract analytics to our market-leading contract lifecycle management solution, DocuSign CLM. In this release, we’re delivering more CLM innovation to help automate your procurement processes. 

• CLM 360 provides a new way to discover critical information and derive agreement and supplier insights via an intuitive user experience, standard reports and key metadata.  This improves visibility and knowledge management in CLM at the repository, vendor and agreement levels, helping you negotiate more efficiently, get agreements signed faster and avoid unwanted renewals or contract terminations. 
• CLM integrations with Workday Financial Management and Netsuite Financials will make it easier than ever to connect CLM to the ERP solutions you use today. By managing your CLM connections in one place, you can automate your common procurement activities and reduce friction across your systems.

We are targeting general availability for these CLM features for April.

New capability for the Salesforce ecosystem

The Agreement Cloud for Salesforce is a suite of purpose-built, powered by Lightning applications that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce—helping you automate contracts without ever leaving Salesforce. With our Salesforce applications, your team can prepare, sign, act on and manage agreements right where your teams are working. 

DocuSign and Salesforce are continuing to invest in our partnership. The latest example is DocuSign Gen for Salesforce Billing, which simplifies invoice generation and delivery for businesses that use Salesforce Billing. Admins can leverage customizable templates to merge data from Salesforce objects into invoices, and then schedule them to be auto-generated and delivered to customers on a recurring basis. We are targeting general availability of this feature for April.

DocuSign Notary

While notarization is an important process that helps assure the authenticity and integrity of critical documents, the majority of notarizations today are conducted in-person and are paper-based. This slows the pace of doing business, delivers a poor signer experience, has a greater risk of identity fraud and ultimately increases costs for the organization. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce DocuSign Notary, the trusted way to remotely and electronically notarize documents. It gives your notaries public the tools they need to securely conduct remote online transactions via an encrypted audio-visual session. Built on eSignature, it allows customers to send, sign and notarize agreements with DocuSign.

This initial release of Notary is available to US-based customers who either employ or contract notaries public seated in supported states. Over time, Notary will also be able to support organizations who don’t supply their own notaries public. 

 We hope you enjoy the new capabilities in DocuSign Agreement Cloud: 2021 Release 1. For further details, please see the release notes.