As I have said many times in my entries – the ‘electronic signatures’ market is a very exciting place to be.  Electronic signature solutions are being adopting more rapidly than ever before and AssureSign’s growth is astounding.  Customers and Partners continue to compliment us on flexibility, ease of setup, ease and sophistication of integration and ongoing support – all things we are very proud of. 

These are great reasons to be excited, but another, which also happens to be very flattering, is to see how other product offerings in the market are starting to take notice – not only are our customers seeing where the market is going,  other vendors are enhancing their products to include features that we have had for years!  We have always believed that our customers (and theirs) should have options in the way they initiate and sign documents.

  • In 2003, AssureSign (then under the 3PV brand) was the first electronic signature vendor to work with the FCC to provide an ESIGN-compliant Electronic Letter of Agency (eLOA®) for our voice service provider customers.  It is still provided today, as it was the genesis of our product offering.
  • In 2006, AssureSign was the first to offer a signing process that replicates pen and paper – stepping a signatory through a document and placing signatures where they belong, not just on the top or bottom of a page or ‘creating a type-written signature’ or rubber stamping a signature throughout a document.
  • In 2006, AssureSign was the first to collect a mouse-based signature requiring no add-on software or hardware- the market and others vendors seemed to really like this one!
  • In 2007, AssureSign was the first to offer customers the choice of per-document or per-seat pricing models.
  • In 2007, AssureSign was the first web-based/SaaS application to provide multiple signatories in a document – in series or parallel. 
  • In 2007, AssureSign was the first to provide email templates and custom workflows to notify interested parties of the status of documents.
  • In 2007, AssureSign was the first to provide custom signature and data collection points in a document (known to us and our customers as JotBlocks).
  • In 2008, AssureSign was the first to offer an open API and Toolkit for partners and customers, known as DocumentNOW®.
  • In 2008, AssureSign was the first to offer web-based document creation – signing documents while in the same web-session.
  • In 2008, AssureSign was the first to merge data from Web or CRM applications (such as Salesforce CRM) onto AssureSign templates and send for signature.
  • In 2008, AssureSign was the first to provide immediate presentment for face-to-face signing scenarios that did not require email notification.
  • In 2008, AssureSign was the first to expose document status to Web or CRM applications (such as Salesforce CRM) for tracking of document workflow.
  • In 2008, AssureSign was the first to introduce Flying Screaming Monkeys to trade shows and customers - if you’ve received one, email us to tell us where your monkey is now.
  • In 2009, AssureSign was the first to provide a sophisticated Security Best Practice initiative with flexible rules for each customer implementation.
  • In 2009, AssureSign was the first to offer data output and integration back to external applications from data collected in the signing process.

And the firsts will continue; by year’s end, AssureSign will be the first to have enterprise-wide SAS-70 Type II certification (not just our own world-class in-house data center, but the whole enterprise).  If you know SAS-70 you will certainly appreciate this initiative!  In a few months, we will be the first electronic signature vendor to be integrated with Salesforce using 100% Force.com Apex code.  We will also release our new DocumentTRAK™ API that will provide an easy to use GUI and ‘Wizards’ to post document status changes to just about any external application.  We’re glad that the competition appreciates the same features our customers have always enjoyed.   Follow the leader – follow AssureSign.