EchoSign
Tuesday, August 8th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
The best way to launch a new application is to find one well-identified pain point, and to solve it very well. This is true for applications that are deployed on premise, as much as it is for applications that are delivered as a service, and no company understood this better than EchoSign, a secure web-based tool for sending, signing, tracking and storing documents. I like the company so much that after meeting with co-founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, I immediately decided to join their Advisory Board.
In a nutshell, what the folks at EchoSign built is a very generic document management system, extended with a collection of simple workflow processes. But instead of marketing it as such, and fighting with established players such as Documentum (now part of EMC) or FileNet, they dumbed it down, and presented it as the easiest tool you could possibly find to get a document signed. I think it’s a really smart move.
Another smart thing they did was to make evaluations as easy as possible. In fact, right from their homepage, users get to try the application by sending themselves a document they’ll need to sign later. This instant try-out is better than a thousand words, and even more engaging than a recorded demonstration. And because the signing process is a collaborative one by its very nature, EchoSign should benefit from some nice viral effects down the road.
Moving forward, a couple of things could be done in order to make the application a very robust document management system. One would be to add a generic process engine to the underlying infrastructure in order to support more complex workflows, and offer customers the ability to build their own approval processes. Another would be to provide integration with online word processors, such as Writely or Zoho Writer, in order to support paperless processes end-to-end, without having to use any desktop application. This would also allow users to drag and drop scanned versions of their hand signatures onto documents to be signed, directly within the web browser.
EchoSign managed to sign several hundred customers — among them large companies such as Brooks Eckerd, Cisco, Network General, AtRoad, or Consumer Debt Solutions, with a very simple application that does a great job at automating a rather simple process. It’s going to be interesting to see how they can scale their customer base horizontally, while offering more and more advanced functionality. With the emergence of Office 2.0, timing seems to be pretty good.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0, Office 2.0
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This has obvious applications for just about every business. It would be more complete if they would combine it with a secure email service. That way my accountant could use it to get my signature on tax forms, my insurance company could get my signature on policies/claims, etc.
Tom,
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll make sure it gets noticed.
Tom,
Thank you for the comments. EchoSign customers today already use EchoSign loosely together with services like Zantaz. We e-mail you PDFs of all your signed agreements, and Zantaz and other systems can securely archive those.
We also have many users in the insurance space as you note in particular. EchoSign fax signed documents are as secure as an e-fax type service; and EchoSign e-signed documents are even more secure because they never “leave” our servers until signed. So I suspect your accountant would be comfortable with EchoSign today.
Look to our next release (late September), we will be adding even more features then.
Thanks again,
-Jason Lemkin, CEO
Very nice to see you’re on the workflow process thread — I do some rudimentary integration by tagging and starring the comments thread for documents I’m tracking. It works pretty well for what it is, and haven’t dropped any documents yet. Curious what Google has up their sleeve!
[…] A good workflow process is one that end-users will want to follow, thanks to a user interface that makes them more productive, while inducing minimal cognitive friction. Translation: Keep It Simple, Stupid! No online service demonstrates this KISS principle better than EchoSign today. I have written about this online document signing service in the past. At the time, I explained what I liked about the service’s architecture, but I had yet to use it for any real application. I am a strong believer in the eat-your-own-dog-food philosophy, and I have used EchoSign as part of our setup for organizing the Office 2.0 Conference. Here is what I learned along the way, followed by some ideas for enabling complex workflows with Office 2.0. […]
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
Leave a Comment