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DocuSign: Providing customers seamless access to eSignature within Google Workspace apps.

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Downloaded more than 2 million times, the DocuSign eSignature App for Google Workspace improves customers’ efficiency, experience, and security—and simplifies DocuSign’s development of new features.

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DocuSign helps organizations connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements. As part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, DocuSign offers eSignature, the world's #1 way to sign electronically on practically any device, from almost anywhere, at any time. Today, over a million customers and more than a billion users in over 180 countries use the DocuSign Agreement Cloud to accelerate the process of doing business and to simplify people's lives.

Features used
Docs
Drive
Admin
Gmail
Apps Script
docusign-hero-image

Downloaded more than 2 million times, the DocuSign eSignature App for Google Workspace improves customers’ efficiency, experience, and security—and simplifies DocuSign’s development of new features.

Google Workspace Results

Already downloaded more than 2 million times from the Google Workspace Marketplace

• Gives customers one-click access to eSignature services from their Google Workspace apps

• Scales to support global users, already facilitating hundreds of thousands of transactions

• Boosts customers’ security and compliance

• Saves months of development effort with the Google Workspace Add-ons UI Design Kit

• Simplifies ongoing development and build management

• Improves customer experience and retention

“Building our services on the Google Workspace platform gives us the opportunity to meet customers where they are. They can access their DocuSign capabilities in the Google apps where they spend all day, every day.” - Tony Ramoutar, Senior Product Manager of Integrations, DocuSign

DocuSign fundamentally changed contract workflows when it launched its first electronic signature application almost two decades ago. Today, DocuSign’s name is ubiquitous with digital contracts: billions of people in 180 countries use DocuSign eSignature services to create, sign, and manage agreements. To further simplify customer workflows, the company developed the DocuSign eSignature App for Google Workspace using Google Apps Script and the Google Workspace Add-on framework. Tony Ramoutar, Senior Product Manager of Integrations at DocuSign, says, “Building our services on the Google Workspace platform gives us the opportunity to meet customers where they are. They can access their DocuSign capabilities in the Google apps where they spend all day, every day so they don’t have to switch contexts and go to a whole different application or website to manage agreements.”

Making the world more agreeable, one signature at a time

"In a business where speed is key, the development efficiency we realize with Google Workspace has a big impact on increasing ROI—and what our teams can accomplish.” - Tony Ramoutar, Senior Product Manager of Integrations, DocuSign

The idea to develop a DocuSign eSignature add-on for Google Workspace came from the need to simplify workloads as much as possible. “A lot of our customers are also Google Workspace customers,” Ramoutar explains. “They were asking for a solution that would enable them to sign a document and check on the status of an agreement in the context of their standard work.”

In six months, the company developed the DocuSign eSignature App for Google Workspace, which gives its customers direct access to eSignature services from Google Workspace apps, including Google Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive. To develop the app, DocuSign used Google Apps Script, the Google Workspace Add-on framework, and the Google Workspace Add-ons UI Design Kit. “We saved multiple developer months just by using the Google Workspace Add-ons Design Kit,” says Ramoutar. “With it, we collect more user feedback early on and cut down on the number of times our research team has to go back and forth with users to finalize our app’s design. In a business where speed is key, the development efficiency we realize with Google Workspace has a big impact on increasing ROI—and what our teams can accomplish.”

Integrations that go with the flow

To facilitate automated eSignature workflows from Google Workspace, DocuSign’s Add-on:

• Detects the user's language settings from Google Workspace and delivers content in that language via the DocuSign globalization service, which supports 14 languages

• Fetches the documents to be signed through the Gmail API, Drive API, or Docs API and uses DocuSign’s eSignature API to put them in an “envelope” on the user’s Google Drive

• Creates an email message using the Gmail API, displays a list of potential envelope recipients and their email addresses using the People API, and then populates the recipient information based on the user’s selection

When the email recipient clicks to sign the documents in the envelope, the app uses DocuSign’s eSignature API, Connect API, asynchronous SynchEnvelope service, and the Drive API to:

• Enable users to digitally sign required fields

• Send the envelope to the specified recipients

• Provide digital copies of the signed documents to the people who signed them as well as the person who initiated the signature process

A seamless experience that sells itself

“For customers who are security and compliance focused, keeping documents contained in the Google-DocuSign ecosystem is a must have benefit.” - Tony Ramoutar, Senior Product Manager of Integrations, DocuSign

Now a recommended app on the Google Workspace Marketplace, the DocuSign eSignature App has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and it’s facilitated hundreds of thousands of transactions. “Our Google Workspace Add-on saves customers clicks,” Ramoutar explains. “Not only do we automate the tedious parts of the agreement process, but now we also give them seamless access to our tools from the Google app they’re already working in, which saves time and reduces learning curves.”

Even though users access their add-on from Gmail, Docs, and Drive, they also have a single point of installation, deployment, and maintenance. “The convenience our customers realize with our Google Workspace Add-on is huge, which is why it drives adoption and long-term retention of our eSignature services,” says Ramoutar. “When customers use our apps as integrations, they’re less likely to churn. Our trial-to-paid subscription rates are two times higher when customers use the integration from the Google Marketplace versus when they just download our app from our website.”

Security that dots all the i’s and crosses all the t’s

By using the eSignature App for Google Workspace, customers can boost security and simplify regulatory compliance. With the solution, there’s no need to upload and download documents between different systems. In Drive, customers can configure controls that track documents and prevent downloads. Additionally, the eSignature App meets industry standards for security, including:

• OAuth 2.0 authentication

• SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, which covers security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality

• European Data Protection Board approval and compliance with its binding corporate rules

• FedRAMP authorization at the moderate impact level

“For customers who are security- and compliance-focused, keeping documents contained in the Google-DocuSign ecosystem is a must-have benefit,” Ramoutar says.

One-click delivery, automatic scale

By taking advantage of the development tools in Google Workspace, DocuSign can quickly add new capabilities to its eSignature add-on. Alex Miner, Software Engineer at DocuSign, says, “Many of the other integrations we manage have onerous paths to production, especially in managing builds. What's amazing to me is the instantaneous deployment of a builder package on Google Workspace. It's readily available to customers the moment you click ‘go.’ That's a huge boon to us, and it definitely increases our agility because we know that our customers are always downloading the most current version of our app.”

When customers use the eSignature App for Google Workspace, DocuSign’s IT teams also save time. Miner explains, “Once we push code up to the production environment through Apps Script, we don't have to worry about scaling our service or monitoring for infrastructure downtime because that’s all managed automatically by Google.” To view real-time usage rates, performance statistics, runtime errors, and other insights about the add-on, DocuSign’s developers use the Google Admin Console.

Empowering customers with development capabilities

DocuSign continues to evolve its Google Workspace Add-on using ideas from its customers as well as its 7,500 employees who also use Google Workspace, the eSignature App, and Google Cloud. For example, customers with specialized use cases wanted more configuration options, so DocuSign is developing a custom Google Apps Script Library. It enables customers’ developers to go deep and access DocuSign’s eSignature API, along with its 400 endpoints, to customize the eSignature add-on to support their unique requirements. Ramoutar concludes, “By giving our customers access to our Google Apps Script Library and DocuSign eSignature API, we help them drive even greater efficiencies in agreement management and get the most out of their DocuSign and Google technology investments.”