Docusign for Salesforce Review

As we’ve said many times, while Salesforce is a splendid CRM system, it has the same problems, out of the box, that are endemic to any CRM system, the main one being integration of non-CRM data or extraneous data sources. This isn’t Salesforce’s fault as the standards of design for CRM tend to omit many data sources by practice which businesses later encounter a need or at least desire to integrate for solidity and uniformity. One of the bigger ones is document signing and leveraging. This pertains to the leads, campaigns, customers and books kept in CRM, but document validation and signing facilities tend to be very … apart from the CRM process due to an oversight in best practices for design. Enter Docusign for Salesforce, one of the many products of Salesforce’s programmability and extensive App Exchange community which adds vaunted additional functionality to this CRM that its competitors can’t match. The developers of Docusign for Salesforce are on a quest to make it the onus of the CRM to handle legal document signing and leveraging natively, so that one more manual conversion of data sources by an overworked intern can be removed, for the benefit and happiness of all involved. But, does Docusign work well? Does it work at all? What all can it do? Let’s take a look. We were apprehensive about this one, because the APIs involved in most document verification and signing systems are quite obtuse due to security and format congruity, so we half expected this system, written in the proprietary Apex framework of Salesforce, to be sketchy. We were pleasantly surprised to see that not only was it as secure as such systems as VeriSign and the like, but actually far easier to use, configure and of course, it works natively with Salesforce, meaning no awkward mapping of data exchange. Among its features is a very slick system that allows online or in-person signing with a single click using a digital signature. This can be done from any kind of device in either mode, meaning that a quick signature of an important order form or account change document can be done from a mobile, a tablet or a PC with equal ease and convenience. This means that no longer will the CRM department have to wait for a digitized copy of a signed printed version of an originally digital record sheet, in order to commence with important processes they must handle. This also, obviously, spares the lives of many trees. Along with this basic, primary signing feature are real-time deal updates via chatter, convenient data merging from any objects via Salesforce’s powerful data management framework, native integrations with external frameworks like Conga Composet, Apttus, BigMachines, Selectica, Upside, Drawloop and Zuora as well. So, along with making the signing of important forms and documents within CRM accounts possible with no transition from outside sources, Docusign for Salesforce also brings in ease of management of this data to integrate it with the standard record types and forms that your company has laid out within Salesforce to begin with. This system does exactly what it claims to do, and much more. You need Docusign even if you don’t realize it yet.