Adobe Document Cloud Powers Forward with Microsoft

A lot of business partnerships look great when they are announced via the inevitable two-boilerplate press release but lack the follow-through to have lasting customer impact. That’s certainly not the case with the Adobe and Microsoft alliance, when it comes to Adobe Document Cloud.

Last September, we announced that Adobe Sign, our e-signature technology and a key component of Document Cloud, was now the preferred e-signature solution across Microsoft’s portfolio. This includes the 100+ million monthly commercial active users of Microsoft Office 365. Just a few months later, over 400 enterprises are working with Adobe and Microsoft, investing more in Adobe Sign or switching to our solution thanks to that agreement. The combination of Adobe and Microsoft is taking e-signatures mainstream.

But, our joint customers need much more than eSignatures for successful business transformation. They need to deliver amazing digital customer journeys that onboard customers without the need for paper. A paper-based process is unlikely to be a great experience for anyone these days, unless you are giving away cash! And, our joint customers need to empower their organizations to streamline all document workflows, not just the subset of documents that require a signature. And, they need to leverage existing technology investments to deliver modern productivity.

Today, we took another step forward with Microsoft by integrating Adobe PDF technologies front and center in the Microsoft tools you use every day. Now Microsoft Office 365 users have the ability to create, manipulate, and view high-quality, secure PDFs across the online versions of Office 365, right from the toolbar in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive and SharePoint. In addition, we’ve more deeply embedded Sign with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and in the next few weeks we’ll begin hosting Adobe Sign on Microsoft’s Azure platform. Check out the full story here.

Think about sales teams that can now combine parts of PowerPoint and PDF files directly in SharePoint to create a new customer proposal, and even get that proposal signed without leaving SharePoint. Or, a CMO of a bank that can now reinvent customer enrollment processes using Dynamics and Adobe Sign.

These kinds of details matter a lot in our digital-first world and can help build your brand and your organization’s reputation. But it only really works if the company or organization is also working to deliver a coherent, cohesive experience across all digital touchpoints: web, mobile, email, you name it. It also only works if your technology “plays well with others” and Adobe Sign already offers integrations with other industry leaders, not just Microsoft, and those include Box, Salesforce and Workday.

As a software company, we know how crucial user-interface placement is in driving active use of a new feature and we prioritize the features that get most prominent positions, in our products, based on rigorous user-testing. Those that are used the most are generally given star-billing across our toolbars, from AcrobatDC to Photoshop CC and new products like Adobe XD. The prominent placement for Adobe technologies — across the Microsoft product family — shows how important both PDF and Adobe Sign is to hundreds of millions of people.

One of the ways we’re making PDF even more ubiquitous and useful is through Adobe Scan, Document Cloud’s free mobile scanning app that uses your smartphone camera to turn any paper document into a high-quality PDF. Scan got a major update today, adding to its text recognition superpowers. New capabilities enable the app to turn physical business cards into sharable digital contacts on your iOS or Android smartphone — brought to you by the power of Adobe Sensei, our Artificial Intelligence platform. Scan is really a must-have for any self-respecting mobile device and you can find out where to download it here.

Adobe recently celebrated the 25th Anniversary of Acrobat, the application that made PDF one of the world’s most-relied on file formats. Today’s announcements show that Adobe continues to innovate around a file format that is quite simply foundational to digital life. And I promise you we’re not stopping here: our engineers are working on some new features and capabilities that will guarantee PDF remains a keystone technology in a world where mobile platforms and devices dominate. Stay tuned!