Getting important documents properly signed and approved can be a chore, especially those that require attention from multiple signers in different locations. DocuSign Pro ($24.99/month, direct) lets you do it all via email. Electronic signatures made through DocuSign are warranted to comply with the ESIGN act, and the service offers a court-accepted audit trail to prove the validity of each interaction.

The product actually comes in several different editions. DocuSign Free costs nothing and lets a single user send out up to five documents for signature per month. DocuSign Pro, reviewed here, is also a single-user product but with no limit on the number of documents. Note that if you pre-pay yearly you can knock the price down to $14.99/month. DocuSign Business and DocuSign Enterprise add centralized management of multiple users, corporate branding, shared document libraries, and more.

DocuSign is similar in some ways to the eContract feature of RPost Office ($79/year direct, 4 stars), but its pricing model is rather different. A $79/year subscription to RPost gets you 100 message units that must be used within the year. The $14.75/month plan, closest to DocuSign's price, gets you 25 units for each month. A given RPost message uses one message unit per addressee per megabyte, so a 2MB message sent to four people would use eight units. DocuSign has no such limit.

Web-Based Overview

The Home tab of your DocuSign account offers an overview of account status. Statistics shown here include the number of "envelopes" awaiting your signature, expiring soon, out for signature by others, and completed. For more detail, the Manage tab lists all of your envelopes, both in-process and completed. Double-clicking an envelope opens it for inspection. The Dashboard tab offers yet another view of DocuSign activity. A pie chart breaks down envelopes by status, and bar graphs show sent and completed envelopes over time.

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Send from the Web

It's possible to integrate DocuSign with Outlook using a third-party add-on, but the service is really meant to be used from the online portal. You can attach documents for signature from local storage or from online document services. At present DocuSign supports Google Docs, Box Docs, Dropbox, and Salesforce for online documents.

Next you'll add recipients, either from your address book or just by typing in the information. Here's where it gets interesting. By default the envelope goes out to all addressees at once and is considered complete when all have signed it. However, you can use the Order column to have it sent sequentially. Once the first recipient has signed it, DocuSign sends it along to the next person with the first recipient's signature and any other additions already in place. That's something RPost doesn't do.

The next step is to write whatever message you want to accompany your documents. This message goes to all recipients, naturally. You can also add individual notes for each recipient, notes that will appear when the recipient views your document.

Finally you can configure reminder and expiration settings for the envelope. The reminder system, not enabled by default, will send a reminder to the recipient if the envelope hasn't been signed within a user-specified number of days, and optionally send additional reminders periodically. By default envelopes expire in 120 days, but you can set a shorter expiry time and optionally send a warning before expiry.