August update from Legalesign

What a summer of sun and coding here at Legalesign, upgrades have been hurtling down the pipe. Expect to see all the how-to detail on these features coming to the support portal and other online articles, but read this for the big picture.

UK infrastructure

Under the surface we completed a long and complex data migration of everything into the UK region. The sole remaining piece is the email system, which goes through Ireland, however customers can use a SMTP server of their own choice

– go to your users' tab and click on an email to do that

– or wait a short while and we will have our own UK email option to offer shortly.

Using your own email system on Legalesign

Many customers are not aware but only the paranoid survive here at Legalesign, we have developed our own CRM and tracking systems, so you can be sure when you visit Legalesign there is no other external tracking and no passing of your data or activity on to other software.

Data protection

We are finishing up the very final pieces on the GDPR features. Data retention is now up and running. Select your own retention policies for each different type of document you may have on Legalesign (uploaded PDFs, text templates, email attachments, and signed documents) on a team-wide basis. Optionally allow your users to set a data retention policy against individual documents. A further helper feature is a facility to set a data retention policy against a stored template, and that policy is then applied to documents e-signed using that template.

Data retention settings in the GDPR portal

As protection against mistakenly deleting an item, you will be asked for your final approval to remove your data. You can change this setting so that removal is automated. If you have a significant daily throughput this might be helpful, but otherwise, a final human check is recommended. If you have more than one GDPR user, a second approval will always be necessary for any data deletion. Click this link for more on GDPR features.

Day-to-day feature upgrades

PDF printing and copying

You will now find you can restrict PDF printing and copying . You can select defaults on the PDF security page (admin users only), but change this on a per-document basis on the Send page. Tick the boxes to prevent printing and/or copying.

Disable printing and copying in your signed PDFs

Save e-signing workflows and share with your team

The new send page is finally out of beta. We strongly urge existing customers to switch, you know who you are. With the new send page everything is saved as you proceed, so you can visit other parts of the site mid-way through sending out a document to be signed, and return to it. If you have lots of ‘sender fields’ (customisations of the document when you send it out) you will know how useful that will be. It’s also good browser crash protection.

Save or ‘freeze’ the page at any stage and share it with your team; it’s a really easy way to set up ready-made document workflows in a way that fits instantly with how you already do things. It’s a big enhancement if you have regular documents to send out you can prepare everything about your document up to entering only the client details.

Save your workflow and share it with your team

With the new send page you can send lots of documents at the same time, and also batch them together . Batches are more than just a collection of documents, they have their own email settings and people who have to sign multiple documents in a batch get a very fast and seamless signing experience.

Batch a set of documents together when sending them to be signed

Document approvals

You won’t know you want this till you really need it: you can now switch signers for approvers (approvers don’t need to sign but only approve or reject a document), and, even more usefully, you can set up a document for a sole approver only: no signature required.

Did you know you can also have approvers or signers decide who the next signer (or approver) will be? Approvers can also have their own fields.

These options may sound esoteric but you will be surprised how often a variation on this will turn up. We understand that e-signature software adoption is not a one-time effort for a business, but a sustained partnership, and this is how we see our customer relationships and how we develop our product. We want our customers to know they have an e-signature system future-proofed for all business e-signing situations that may arise. If you have a complex signing workflow, challenge us to handle it.

Time-zone handling for signers and approvers

We are not quite done with signers and approvers. We have also added time-zone support. Previously time-zone was selected by users only, so signers would adopt the timezone of the person who sent them the document. Now you can select a time-zone for a signer or approver when entering their name and email. If you already sent it to that person the system will remember and re-apply that same time-zone. As you might expect, if you set a document expiry date or a reminder schedule, they will sync to the person’s time-zone too.

Change the timezone for a signer or approver

One click upload and send

Did we say there were a few improvements? Previously with Legalesign you would upload a document, prepare it (i.e. place a signature, add where to date the document, etc.), and then go to send it. Customers wanted a way to upload and send quickly without editing. You can now do this on the PDF upload page either by using text tags in your document that we convert into fields automatically, or if you only need the document approved.

One click upload to send with Legalesign

Multiple PDF upload and combine. Appending PDFs.

On that same upload page you can also upload multiple PDFs at once, and, if you like, append them together into a single large document. You can also use the new Append PDF feature on the Document Automation page to put together PDFs you already uploaded. This will be useful if your final documents tend to be in two parts, say, a custom part for a given signer and then a generic terms and conditions. More nice stuff you didn’t know you needed, but we promise you, once you get using e-signature, you’ll be surprised how often you will find the need for features like this.

Upload and combine multiple files

UX improvements

Watchful customers will also have noticed small interface improvements across the site, such as the PDF edit fields helpfully sliding down the page with you while you edit your document.

Development pipeline

What’s coming up in the next month or two? We have a lot of ideas, but we only develop things that customers want. So if you have something on your mind, let us know about it. Here are some of the things we’d like to do: storing your documents on your own cloud servers (we may just go ahead and do this, starting with SharePoint), having ‘meta’ information associated with your document (i.e. so you can tag them with some other information, such as your own references and IDs, which will be useful if you use the API or when we do set up external storage and you need to decide how to name those stored documents). Also we'd like to improve the presentation of our uploaded document listings with folders functions and a better display.

Thank you for reading. If you would like a change or improvement on Legalesign let us know about it, we only make a change when we know it will benefit a customer. This means everything you get is real world tested and proven and the platform continues to usefully improve over time. If you haven’t used Legalesign start a free trial here, and contact us to get a one to one webinar demo.