Adobe looking to expand digital signatures
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Adobe looking to expand digital signatures

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by Jennifer Smith
Adobe looking to expand digital signatures

Adobe Systems is well known for its Creative Cloud tools and its Acrobat products that use the PDF format it invented. As the world moves towards a more digital way of reviewing and approving documents Adobe wants to see its tools at the forefront of this trend. Adobe is positioning itself as a leading provider of digital signatures using its line of Acrobat products, as they look to grow upon the reported 210 million documents that were digitally signed last year. This number is set to triple over the next three years, as Adobe and competitor Docusign vie for customers to use their tools to review, approve, and digitally sign documents. 

Adobe has included basic digital signature capabilities in their Acrobat tools for many years, and with their Acrobat DC version, these capabilities continue to grow. Last week Adobe announced that files stored on Dropbox can be easily incorporated into digital signature approval processes for customers who are subscribers to Adobe DC, for Document Cloud. To use these capabilities, businesses need to be paying for both the Dropbox and Acrobat DC services. Yet for customers of both, the upgrade may provide a useful way to stored documents on one server while using Adobe DC to route the files for review and approval. According to Dropbox, there are many files for which this may be useful, as they have more than 18 billion PDF files on the Dropbox servers. You can learn more about the various stages of these processes through many Adobe training workshops.

Adobe isn’t stopping with Dropbox, as they have agreements in place with Ariba to establish approvals for purchasing and procurement, along with e-signature capabilities that exist with 400 processes that relate to HR and finance within a company.

This competition in the digital signature sector is good for most businesses that do work online or have many documents in review processes. While Adobe is a favorite among desktop users, their competitor at DocuSign has recently signed a distribution agreement with Dell, which had recently purchased online storage provide EMC.

About the author

Christopher Smith is president of American Graphics Institute. He is the co-author of Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies and more than 10 other books on design and digital publishing. He served as publisher and editor of the Digital Classroom book series, which has sold more than one million books on topics relating to InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro and other Creative Cloud apps. At American Graphics Institute, he provides strategic technology consulting to marketing professionals, publishers designers, and large technology companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and HP. An expert on web analytics and digital marketing, he also delivers Google Analytics classes along with workshops on digital marketing topics. Christopher did his undergraduate studies the at the University of Minnesota, and then worked for Quark, Inc. prior to joining American Graphics Institute where he has worked for more than 20 years.