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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Docusign and CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Docusign and CRM

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Posted on by Simon Finn 265

We’re in the process of implementing Docusign into our CRM (and/or Sharepoint) and we’re stumped on forming the documents to be sent. We’re needing to have fields from an Entity automatically populate on these documents and then have the ability to send through Docusign easily. The route I’ve been using thus far was to use MailMerge to do this? This does work to get the fields in a document however this doesn’t allow us to send through Docusign in the process of creating and sending the mail merged document. It seems like Mail Merge will step through the process but not finish unless you have selected your recipients and mailed it out to them. My question is: is there a way to populate fields from an entity on a document easily and then give us the ability to send through Docusign other than Mail Merge? Mail merge just doesn’t seem like the way to go for this but maybe it is and we’re just missing something in the process... Does anyone use Docusign integration? What's your method?

Let me know what you all think and as always thanks for your time!

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  • Dan Reid Profile Picture
    Dan Reid 70 on at

    Simon,

     Firstly, my name is Dan Reid, and I work for DocuSign.  I am the Product Manager in charge of (among other things) integration, including to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  Let me try to answer your question, and give a little background.

    Firstly, DocuSign is an extremely extensible platform.  We ship a full set of APIs (REST and SOAP), with full documentation to do almost everything you can do through the UI.  (more about that here:  www.docusign.com/devcenter).  

    As a result of those APIs, we partner with hundreds of companies to provide both custom, and "OOTB" integrations.  SOme of them we build, but many more are done by our partners.  

    In the case of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (2011) we built a "Connector" that works with the Opportunity.  THe goal of that connector is to make it very easy to install, and get up and using DocuSign.  It isn't a complicated connector, and it isn't intended to be.  All it does is grab all the Notes and Attachments off the Opportunity, and pop up a "Sending Session" in a new tab to allow you to easily get things signed.  

    That is a nice thing to do, and works just fine, however, in many cases, our customers/partners want a special flow.  They (like it seems you do) want specific (often custom) data to be pulled from an object (maybe it is a simple object like Opportunity, maybe it is something you extended, etc).  They want that data to be popped into a document (maybe it is a Word file, or PDF, or whatever), and they might even want that data to "write back" to the source object.

    All of that is VERY possible (and actually kinda common) but it is very difficult to put that capability in an "out of the box" product designed to be drop dead simple.  

    So the short answer is that you can most certainly do what you ask (and you don't need to do mail merge), but you'll need to use the APIs, so you can pass the custom data to the places you need to pass it (and to bring it back).

    I don't want to (well... I sorta do, but I'll resist) write a whole novel on which API calls to use, how to do embedded sending, and how to automatically drop data into the correct spots in either a tagged document or a template in DocuSign, but if you'd like more information, let me know.

    Lastly, we have many partners (Microsoft VARs) who know DocuSign well, and could help you if you need any help.

    Sorry for the long response.

    -Dan

  • BillJohnston Profile Picture
    BillJohnston 5 on at

    Just wanted to chime in... We have been using AssureSign integrated with Dynamics CRM in several places, and not just Opportunities, using standard and custom fields to create a ‘merged’ document.  Most of what we use is off-the-shelf, but some was done through a partner.  We are also looking at some of their solution partners for future projects that can help with document creation within Dynamics, to bring in data from other sources outside of CRM.  

  • Simon Finn Profile Picture
    Simon Finn 265 on at

    Thanks for reaching out to us Dan! We would definitely be interested in learning more about what API's you all can offer. Really we want something that kind of works like Mail Merge as in where we can pull Data to a document and then send through Docusign EASILY with minimal clicks.

  • Dan Reid Profile Picture
    Dan Reid 70 on at

    Simon (and Bill),

      DocuSign has an extremely robust set of APIs, to allow you to make even the wierdest, or most specific use cases easy to automate.  After all, who would put up with a manual process?  

    It is easy for me to type in some forum about how easy things are, but I'd rather show you.

    As I mentioned above, the main link for our devcenter (which has all of the tools I am talking about) is www.docusign.com/devcenter.

    There you can get a demo/dev account (you don't have to talk to a sales dude, or anything like that, just click the link, and you'll be up and running.  There's also all sorts of DOcumentation, and a link to our forums (which has thousands of active developers on it, so you can easily scroll through and see the types of stuff people are working on.  To give you an idea of how active our integration community is, we certified 253 apps (integrations) in 2011, and we do more than 1 a day now.  We wouldn't be able to handle that volume if it was a pain in the butt, or the tools were no good.  ;)

    Now, if you notice on the DevCenter website, there's a link to the "API Explorer" (I am talking about REST here, because it is more popular, but we have a full SOAP API as well, of course).  The API explorer is a DocuSign extension (we built it) on Mashery's IODocs.  It allows you to, in real time, try out all of the calls you'd need to do whatever integration you wish.  Remember that Demo/Dev account you got above?  Just plug the Creds from that into IODOCS, and start making API calls (and seeing the response headers, etc) live, without downloading, or installing anything.

    THe link for that is:

    http://iodocs.docusign.com/

    Additionally, if you click the "API Walkthrough" link at the top, you'll see step by step walkthroughs of scenarios.  The one you seem to want is likely "Embedded Sending" which is the one in the lower left of the scenarios here:

    iodocs.docusign.com/APIWalkthrough

    I'll stop there (short of coding it up), but does this make sense?

    Let me know what else I can help with?

    -Dan

  • Simon Finn Profile Picture
    Simon Finn 265 on at

    I checked out the Docusign site and forums and really kept hitting deadends. All though I haven't spoken to a Docusign Dev yet I can only imagine they charge for such requests as like the one we're trying to accomplish.

    The more I dig into it, it seems the better route for a streamline process to send out docs populated with information from an Account in CRM 2011 would be to use Sharepoint BCS integration. I'm looking into that route now as the Mail Merge and Docusign is just way to cumbersome to the end-user.

  • Dan Reid Profile Picture
    Dan Reid 70 on at

    Simon,

     What dead ends did you hit?  As I mentioned, DocuSign is not a mail merge tool.  You can either create a document outside DocuSign, fill in stuff, and then send it to us, OR have a template in DocuSign that you feed data in to.  The former will work fine, of course, but building the doc is up to you (outside DocuSign).  THe latter will work fine (and is easy) but it means you have to have the template set up to accept the exact info you want to send, and depending on how many "if thens" you have in your logic, that might or might not be a good way to go.

    I am guessing about your whole use case, because I haven't seen your doc, your data, or really anything.  

    But I'd be sure curious to hear what deficiencies you found on our developer center, because our normal feedback is that that tends to be self service.  Any feedback would be great!  We very much invest in updating our tools regularly, so let me know what we could do to make the experience better?

    -Dan

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