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eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

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Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#81

Post by danpalmer »

gauravphoenix wrote: post #29

This isn't a DocuSign killer yet and won't be for a while until Google get its enterprise story right. DocuSign is deeply integrated with third party workflows in large organizations. That's where the big bucks are and you can build a sticky business.

On the one hand this is true, however there's another side to this that makes it quite compelling.

IT sign-off and buying new IT services is hard in many large businesses. This means that it's almost always worth using a built-in feature of software you already have, than going for external software. Add to this the fact that companies almost never have one company account, each team re-buys the same software because services are hard, and the fact that most companies already use DocuSign matters a bit less.

Much of Slack's growth has been built on this[^1]. You can sign up for a free account and start inviting your immediate team. Paying for a small team is well under the typical auto-approved expenses limit, and when you've sunk your cost, got a bunch of people onboard, and proved the value, only then do you go to IT to get it rolled out across the business.

Individuals using this sort of thing, termed "shadow IT", is a good way to grow usage. This feature of docs seems well positioned to grow that way even if DocuSign is available.

[^1]: I worked on a team that was required by the business to use MS Teams. While we waited for the Teams workspace to be provisioned and all the authentication crap to be sorted out we signed up for Slack, invited everyone, and got work done for the 6 months it took to get a working Teams workspace.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#82

Post by 30minAdayHN »

At this point I'm worried if Google will sunset their new features. Does anyone else have similar worries? At a personal level, I got bitten couple of times, or may be even more... (one was for the Inbox - or zero email gmail concept and second time with Google Domains)

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#83

Post by themagician »

gauravphoenix wrote: post #29

This isn't a DocuSign killer yet and won't be for a while until Google get its enterprise story right. DocuSign is deeply integrated with third party workflows in large organizations. That's where the big bucks are and you can build a sticky business.

[flagged]

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#84

Post by princevegeta89 »

whitej125 wrote: post #53

We use DocuSign here and the amount of time I spend hopping back and forth (exporting and importing) between Google and DocuSign is annoyingly high. If Google were to enter this space... I would personally welcome it.

Personally I found the entire design and the organization of files/docs/sheets between Google Drive and other apps in the Google ecosystem is confusing as hell. There was no way to follow a specific hierarchy and the commenting/reviewing system felt clunky.

Wish I never had to use this Google suite of products if it wasn't for my employer.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#85

Post by crazygringo »

danielrhodes wrote: post #23

First this is a great idea. Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better. I haven't used the feature, but from reading the blog post it is sad to see how poorly Google executes on products, even at the beta stage. Some context: I've built such a product before and eSigs are more simple than they seem as long as you do a few things. 1) You need to verify somebody's identity. Sending them an email with t…

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better.

I just find these comments to be so strange. You can look at all of the articles in that blog to see all of the feature improvements that have launched in Docs over the past 2 years. It's a lot of stuff.

Maybe they're not features that matter to you, some are available only to paid customers as opposed to free tier, or maybe you just haven't bothered to even notice. But they're there.

It's nothing about Google specifically -- I see people make these comments about so much software, where they assume a project is or has been dead, just because they can't even be bothered to look at the changelog. It baffles me.

It's like, unless it's a radical total UX overhaul, people don't notice the work developers are putting in on actual features. And if it is a radical total UX overhaul, people complain about the change because they assume it's superficial rather than actual features.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#86

Post by TeMPOraL »

delecti wrote: post #67
codetrotter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway, just thought that whipping out "Google kills products" meme for a mere feature was a bit much. I know I’m beating a dead horse^W^W^W dead Google products but, they really do kill a lot of popular products https://killedbygoogle.com/ That being said, if they add eSig for Google Docs I agree; I don’t see why nor how they’d kill that individual feature unless they kill Docs all-together. Which, hopefully, they…

A great many of their killed products ended up being merged/evolved into other ones (Duo into Meet). A great many more weren't even "killed"; over the past 20 years their in-gmail chat program has evolved from Talk to Hangouts, and then from Hangouts to Chat. It has kept the same chat history throughout the past 20 years, but "killed by google" lists Talk and Hangouts as two killed products.

> It has kept the same chat history throughout the past 20 years

So how come I can't access chats from before mid-2013? Not even by Google Takeout?

(It so happens that some of the most important conversations in my life happened in 2012, so I'm to date super annoyed that, for no good reason, 2013 is some kind of cut-off date.)

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#88

Post by ec109685 »

nextos wrote: post #61
danielrhodes wrote: post #23

First this is a great idea. Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better. I haven't used the feature, but from reading the blog post it is sad to see how poorly Google executes on products, even at the beta stage. Some context: I've built such a product before and eSigs are more simple than they seem as long as you do a few things. 1) You need to verify somebody's identity. Sending them an email with t…

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better. Recently, they have also improved the UI on Google Docs and Gmail making it much less laggy. On my old NUC computer, it makes a big difference. It seems that middle-management is becoming a bit less sclerotic.

Chrome improvements might be helping there too.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#89

Post by crazygringo »

notfried wrote: post #2

14 months in testing, followed by a beta, is really moving too slow.

Not when it's a legal feature designed for enterprises.

A partner company willing to test it is going to take 3 months to review and choose to adopt it, another 3 months trying to convert a few internal flows, and another 6 months to observe how it changes processes and whether it's an improvement or not.

The point here is to get it right, not to get it quick. Enterprise software is the literal opposite of "move fast and break things".

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

rvnx wrote: post #42
j_san wrote: post #3

Is this targeted for the US market or also the EU? Does this qualify as a an advanced electronic signature (AdES) under the eIDAS regulation?

No it doesn't, not considered as a trusted (certified) provider and doesn't meet the level for secure user authentication. It's like a gadget in Europe then. But still, it is useful. It can be used if you want to ask your daughter to promise to "Get good grades at school" in exchange for an extra Christmas gift, for example. And make it look like official. It's like pretending to be signing.

In other words: is strictly less useful than a "fake analog signature" script that uses imagemagick to paste a PNG/SVG with a signature (or a random one from a directory of signatures) on the last page of the document, and then to apply some or all of random {sub-2deg rotation, tiny gaussian blur, tiny non-linear transform, color threshold, strong desaturation}, to make it seem like the document was printed out, signed, and scanned back.
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