Microsoft’s pact with DocuSign promises seamless e-signature tools for Office 365 users and will stimulate interest in Office apps.

Microsoft Office 365 customers will soon manage to sign documents electronically without outside applications — a capability that might help businesses to embrace the paperless office ideal.

Users will gain the feature attributable to an extended-term partnership Microsoft announced Monday with the prominent e-signature company DocuSign. The deal could help stimulate developer interest in Microsoft’s fledgling Office App Store. It also adds to a growing list of capabilities Microsoft has infused into Office 365 to distinguish the cloud-based subscription service from traditional standalone versions. Last week, as an illustration, the corporate released its Power BI suite of commercial intelligence tools for Office 365.

DocuSign’s tools could be available in early March as a freemium add-on distributed during the Office Store. It is going to be integrated into Outlook, Word, SharePoint Online, and SharePoint Server 2013.

When people must sign and return documents, fax machines and printers aren’t always available, especially as people spend more time on mobile devices. This makes electronic signatures a less complicated alternative, DocuSign CMO Dustin Grosse told us. Workflows in keeping with physical documents introduce errors, decelerate transactions, and ultimately add unnecessary cost, confusion, and aggravation, he said.

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DocuSign would be integrated with Azure Active Directory to enable single signon. Users ought to be ready to sign documents without leaving the applications and without re-authenticating earlier than applying a signature. Grosse said free services will include the power to sign and return documents sent to you and to send a limited choice of your personal documents to folks. DocuSign will offer additional paid services beyond the core offerings.

Signed documents shall be stored in OneDrive or OneDrive for Business, reckoning on whether the user has a house or Professional Office 365 account. Many enterprises may be hesitant to store important businesses documents within the cloud, but Grosse said DocuSign has implemented multiple security precautions to aid customers rest easier.

Security and privacy are important to plenty of consumers. DocuSign offers not just file encryption but additionally an audit trail and the promise to “back you up in court if any transaction is every legally questioned.” Only document owners are granted key access, meaning customers’ encrypted data is inaccessible even to DocuSign employees.

To demonstrate his company’s trustworthiness, he also cited DocuSign’s list of corporate customers, along with Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Fidelity Investments, and Comcast.

Some Office 365 customers have praised the service for lightening the load on in-house IT staff members, enabling mobility programs, and providing financial flexibility. Office apps, though, had been noteworthy more for his or her potential than their popularity. Partnerships just like the one with DocuSign could help Microsoft gain momentum.

Microsoft senior director Arpan Shah told us the corporate is devoted to creating the Office Store “a platform that partners and developers can easily build contextual solutions on top of” and that harnesses Microsoft services inclusive of OneDrive and Active Directory for straightforward security and administration. Cloud-based apps allow developers to remain at the bleeding edge by constantly pushing new, innovative features to users.

Microsoft and DocuSign are expected to illustrate their offering during Microsoft’s SharePoint 2014 Conference, so that it will kick off Monday, March 3, in Las Vegas.

Office 365 faces a variety cloud-based challengers, including Google Apps for Business and, to a lesser extent, Apple’s iWork suite. But Microsoft COO Kevin Turner told analysts in September that Office 365 was on pace for greater than $1.5 billion in annual revenue, and that 440 of Google’s corporate customers had defected to Office 365 in the last year.

Last month, the corporate credited Office 365 and Azure for driving 10% growth in its commercial revenue streams. The corporate also reported that, regardless that consumer sales of standalone Office licenses were down, Office 365 Home Premium subscriptions had increased more 75% because the previous fall.

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Michael Endler joined InformationWeek as an associate editor in 2012. He previously worked in talent representation within the entertainment industry, as a contract copywriter and photojournalist, and as a teacher. Michael earned a BA in English from Stanford University in 2005 … View Full Bio

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