Adobe Sign: September 2021  

• Sandbox - Enterprise tier customers have the option to purchase access to a Sandbox environment to test templates, customer workflows, API applications, and more. These objects can be moved from production to the sandbox for updates in a safe environment, then moved back to production once the updates are verified and ready for deployment.

• ECDSA Digital Signature Support - Adobe Sign now supports more secure and efficient digital signatures based on the ECDSA format, which uses elliptic curve cryptography as defined in the ANS X9.62-2005 standard.
  NIST curves with SHA-2 hash functions, as defined by FIPS standards, are now supported, giving our Trust Service Providers (TSP) partners from the Cloud Signature Consortium the option to provide signers with faster and safer elliptic curve credentials, including those meeting the recommended requirements for US Federal and Singapore Government use.

• Liquid Mode Updated -The Liquid Mode signing experience has been extended beyond agreements to include web forms. Liquid Mode forms can dramatically improve the signer's experience by reducing the need to pinch and zoom to view the form content while improving the focus on fields that need to be filled.

Details on Liquid Mode can be found here >

• New TSPs - Cleverbase (Netherlands), PrimeSign (Austria), Sectigo (Global), and TrustPro (Ireland) are the new Trust Service Providers from the Cloud Signature Consortium providing certificates to apply secure digital signatures that meet the highest standards and compliance requirements.

• Customize the To and CC fields in email headers to recipients - Customers that are concerned about leaking email addresses via the email headers to recipients can opt to hide the email address values in the To and CC fields.
  
  • This option is available to enterprise and business tier accounts and can be configured at the account and group levels.
  • The feature controls can be accessed by navigating to Account Settings > Email Settings > Customize To and CC fields.
    

• Adobe Terms of Use Acceptance on eSign pages - To comply with Adobe Legal requirements, Adobe Sign is updating the terms of use (ToU) acceptance behavior on the eSign page. Under the new experience, all "unknown" recipients must accept the Adobe Sign ToU and Privacy Policy (by clicking the Continue button) before interacting with the agreement. This acceptance is distinct from any custom ToU that the customer account may have configured, which will continue to resolve per the account TOU/CD acceptance configuration.
• An "unknown" recipient is any email address that is not a registered, active user email in a trusted account.
  
• "Known" users have accepted the Adobe Sign ToU as part of the registration process when they verified their user account, so they are not prompted to accept again.

Below is an example of the Implicit consent flow for an agreement with a custom ToU configured by the customer:

1. Accept the Adobe Sign ToU by selecting the Continue button (after opening the agreement).
2. Fill in the agreement fields as required.
3. Accept the Customer Disclosure and custom ToU by selecting the  Click to Sign button.
   

• Locking name values extended to typed signatures - The March release introduced a setting to enable/disable a recipient's ability to edit their name value when signing, provided the name was supplied or known (via API or user profile).  Typed signatures were excluded from this feature resulting in the ability for some signers to change their name value during the signature process.  The September release updates this feature to honor the name locking setting for all signature types – including typed signatures. 
  
• Customers who have enabled Typing their name and initials and disabled Signers can change their name or initials will see a behavior change – the name value is no longer editable during the signature process for typed signatures.
  
• Customers that want to allow editing the name-value during the signature process should enable the Signers can change their name or initials setting (in the Signature Preferences menu).

• Inactive users can sign agreements - Adobe Sign is now treating Inactive users as if they are unknown to the system (for the purpose of signing in-bound agreements). When an Inactive user is asked to sign an agreement, a new, single-use userID is created expressly for the purpose of signing that one agreement. The single-use userID is independent of the Inactive userID, and the account which governs it. This has several ramifications:
• Agreements sent to an Inactive user can be signed, as the Inactive status does not apply to the single-use userID generated for the agreement.
•  Agreements signed by the single-use userID are not assets of the Inactive userID and do not reside in the account of the Inactive userID.
• Shares from the Inactive userID will not reflect agreements signed by single-use userIDs.
• Reporting against the Inactive userID will not reflect agreements signed by the single-use userID.
• If the Inactive userID is reactivated, they will not see the records of the agreements signed by the single-use userIDs on their Manage page.

There are two exceptions to the above behavior:

• Agreements sent to the user before they were flagged as Inactive may not be signed (the agreement was already bound to the Inactive userID).
• Users explicitly configured to not be allowed to sign agreements will continue to be disallowed any signing actions.
  

Inactive users are still prevented from logging in to the Adobe Sign system and sending agreements under their authority (by any method).

• Improved security for web form access via password - Web forms have included a delay after a number of unsuccessful attempts to access a password-protected URL.

• Aadhaar International Support – Customers from all Adobe Sign instances can now use the optional Aadhaar service as a digital signature provider. Previously it was only available to accounts on the IN1 instance. The Aadhaar add-on can be purchased at an additional cost per signature transaction.

• Limited sharing of agreements - Agreement sharing has been capped when sharing the agreement to an external email address.
  
  • Multi-license accounts can share any one agreement up to ten times. 
    
  • Individual accounts can share an agreement up to 5 times.
    
  • Sharing an agreement with internal users is unrestricted.

• Custom Company Name in Phone Authentication has been removed from service - The customizable company name value that could be inserted into the Phone Authentication method has been removed from service as announced in the June Technical Notification.

• HIPAA-enabled accounts can now access the controls for images and links in recipient emails on the Global/Group Settings page.

Review the HIPAA related configurations here >

• The order that File Attachments are included in the final PDF has been updated to sort by page number first, and then field position second (when reading left to right; top to bottom)
  

• The Replace Recipient feature on the new Manage page now allows the sender to include an optional message for the new recipient.

Review the Replace Recipient feature for more details >

• External signers accessing completed agreements now must pass an authentication process when multi-factor authentication has been configured for the agreement (instead of being prompted to log in to Adobe Sign).

• Web forms now report the field values of unverified web forms when accessing field data using the Download Form Field Data feature on the Manage page.

For more details on web forms >  

• Read Agreement option for web forms - Two new REST v6 API calls are available to provide access to view web forms:
  • GET /widgets/<resourceId>
  • GET /widgets/<resourceId>/combinedDocument/url
• GET/workflows/{workflowId} now returns the participant role in the response.