How to use Microsoft Teams Approvals with eSign: Adobe Sign

If you are using Microsoft Teams in Public Preview then you can already try out Approvals application integration with eSign using Adobe Sign provider. It has been stated that more providers will be added in the future. However Adobe Sign is a very popular service so it is a good way to get started with eSign if you haven’t taken a look at it before.

This recent capability opens new possibilities how to use Approvals application: signing documents electronically so both parties can be sure that the document been changed during the process.

First: you need to make sure you have Microsoft Teams Public Preview on. If you don’t have it enabled you don’t currently see new options in the Approvals-application.

You can ask your administrators to enable Public Preview to you and then you can turn it on by yourself.

Creating eSign approval request

Open approval application and either sign into Adobe Sign or start a free 14 day trial to test it out.

Once you have signed into Adobe Sign you can see all your previous approvals.

Just hit “+New approval request” to get started with a document signing. You need to have the document on your hard drive.

Select eSign and Adobe Sign (there isn’t any other options in this phase) and enter details: name of the request and details.

Upload the document you want to eSign.

Once you have the document uploaded you will then define who will be needed to sign them and -if necessary- who approves it. On default Must complete in order is on so approvals proceed in sequential format.

You can define roles freely. Then you enter names / emails to the box and you have move those approving phases up and down until you are happy with the processing order.

Finally when everything is ready pressing Send will start the approval process.

You can keep track on the progress using your Approval application.

Signing using Approval application

Steve is also using Public Preview & signed into Adobe Sign with Teams and after getting a notification he can check what’s in the queue for him.

Opening the request allows Steve to see what’s include in it.

He sees who will be signing the document and can also read the contract. Which is a good idea to do before jumping to signing part. When he is ready he clicks on Review.

If Steve wouldn’t be having Adobe Sign account then he would find the same request in his email. In fact all these requests go to email as well – even when Teams Approval application is in use.

This opens the request in ordinary Adobe Sign web page. From there it goes just like any other Adobe Sign process.

Once the document has been signed the result can be seen in Approvals-application. The person who initiated the process gets a notification and can follow up the progress.

Approving the document with eSign

John London, who is our approver of the day, doesn’t have an account to Adobe Sign for some strange reason. So he won’t be seeing the request in his Teams Approvals application. Instead he reads his email often and sees the request in there – just like with any other Adobe Sign process.

John can see that Steve has signed the document and he goes through it and approves it.

Tracking the process

The original process requestor gets notifications to his Teams whenever something happens to the document in the process.

Clicking the notification opens Approval application and the progress with times can be viewed

Some people don’t prefer to see those times in the friendly mode, but unfortunately that can not be changed. However when time passes those transform to more normal looking date format – and eventually to real dates.

Since Approvals application came out in mid-January there isn’t unfortunately an example where the year is shown. However the exact time is not shown.