Microsoft announced a long term partnership with DocuSign to integrate its eSignature electronic apps with Office 365.
Microsoft, the biggest software company, announced a "long-term strategic partnership" with DocuSign on Monday to integrate its eSignature electronic apps in Office 365. This move will simplify the process of negotiating digital contract proceedings, which is a painful method of signing, scanning, faxing and repeating the process multiple times for authenticity. The partnership between Microsoft and DocuSign will add support for eSignature apps in Office 365 that integrate with Outlook, Word, SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2013 in the Office Store in March.
Documents digitally signed with DocuSign's eSignature apps will be saved in Microsoft OneDrive for businesses automatically and administrators will be able to add DocuSign apps to all users from their admin consoles, the eSignature company said. To manage accounts more easily, DocuSign uses the Azure Active Directory that provides single sign-on for all apps within Office 365.
"Leading partners like DocuSign are building apps on the Office platform to help our customers get more value directly from their most highly used applications," John Case, vice president of Marketing at Microsoft Office, said in a press release. "This partnership with DocuSign helps our customers keep transactions digital and manage eSignatures seamlessly from within Office 365, where they already communicate, collaborate and create."
The partnership follows a string of improvements made by Microsoft to its Office suite. Last week, the Redmond software giant said it would extend the multifactor authentication for all Office 365 users to reduce threat against online identity theft. The company also added support message encryption support for Office 365 users last November for sending encrypted emails to recipients outside an organization.
The new DocuSign apps will be shown at Microsoft's SharePoint 2014 Conference in Las Vegas, starting March 3 and runs through March 6.
