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Microsoft and Adobe are building on the partnership that they forged in September 2017 with a deeper integration between the latter’s e-signature technology and Dynamics 365.
Adobe Sign, part of the Adobe Document Cloud digital document service that allows businesses to securely capture signatures electronically and create paperless business processes, now supports multi-step Dynamics 365 workflows for automated sales processes, Adobe announced on June 19.
Combined, e-signatures and automation can help organizations increase the speed in which business gets done, according to Lisa Croft, Group Product Marketing Manager at Adobe. “For example, Lifetime Training, one of the UK’s leading training providers, has seen a time savings of 90 percent and a 35 percent reduction in contract errors,” Croft wrote in an email to eWEEK.
Users can also expect a new interface with improved navigation and real-time access to data stored in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a capability that reduces errors while working with contracts, the company claimed.
Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s cloud-enabled business applications suite that features customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality. However, it’s not the first time Adobe software has been integrated with Microsoft enterprise applications.
The Adobe Campaign service and Adobe Experience Manager, a marketing-focused content management system aimed at driving customer engagement, already integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365. In the case of Adobe Experience Manager, the tie-up enables joint customers to access CRM data stored in Dynamics 365 for richer, more personalized promotional messaging.
Adobe Sign is also poised to help U.S. government agencies advance their digital transformation efforts.
The product is now officially a FedRAMP Tailored authorized application, the company announced. FedRAMP, or Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, standardizes cloud monitoring, security assessments and authorizations, providing U.S. government agencies with baselines they can use for their cloud-based IT buying decisions.
The FedRAMP Tailored program kicks things up a notch by streamlining the process of adopting approved cloud services, allowing agencies to get up and running faster than allowed by traditional government technology procurement practices.
Finally, Adobe Sign will be moving into new cloud data centers, the company announced. In another customer win for Microsoft, the service will be hosted on the Azure cloud computing platform in the coming weeks, with other regions to follow later.
Office 365 Grows More PDF-Savvy
Adobe also recently unveiled new capabilities that help Office 365 users better manage content saved in PDF (Portable Document Format) files via new Adobe PDF services integrations.
“Now Microsoft Office 365 users have the ability to create, manipulate, and view high-quality, secure PDFs across the online versions of Office 365, right from the toolbar in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive and SharePoint,” stated Ashley Still, vice president and general manager of Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud Enterprise, in a June 18 announcement.
Users will be able to seamlessly save Office content in Adobe PDF files that preserve formatting, layouts and fonts and can be optionally password protected for an additional layer of security.
The new PDF features now appear in the ribbon menu of the web-based versions of those apps for joint customers who have switched on the integration. Adobe also introduced a new Combine Files feature that allows users to pull in various PDF files into a final file for improved organization or archival purposes in SharePoint document libraries.