Nintex Workflow Actions for Adobe Esign Cloud
1/22/2018
This is a
fairly long post. The topics to be
covered are mentioned below. Complete Source Code will be uploaded in few days
- The Requirements ( this post )
- How Adobe Esign Works
- The Adobe Esign Solution
- The Nintex WF Actions
- Installation Instructions.
Through out the post , I will refer to SharePoint OnPremise as SoP. Custom Nintex WF Action as NAction
Problem Statement
We have a
SharePoint 2013 On Premise
installation. Till very recently we were
using on Premise Cosign as our E-signature
solutions. CoSign was bought by DocuSign and a decision was
taken by Management to move to a new Esign solution
That left
us looking for a different signing solutions for all the on Premise documents.
The new solutions not only should let users esign the documents within SoP but
also must have corresponding Nintex actions so that we could use this signing
facilitity in the context of various Nintex WFs we had already written. That means, we needed custom NActions just
like old CoSign On Premise had. Also, as we are moving to SPO ( SharePoint Online ), we needed
to make sure the new Esign Provider should have some story over there also.
We looked
into two solutions. Adobe Esign and Valid
Sign. Valid Sign had a strong case,
because it already had replacement for those Cosign Nintex Custom Actions which we were using in our WFs. Adobe Esign on the other hand had a strong story on the Cloud part of the deal but nothing for On Premise solutions. Plus Adobe's licencing story was better suited to our case. So due to these reasons we went for Adobe Esign.
That brings
to the reason for this post. Adobe Esign is a complete cloud product. All the
documetns to be signed by users, have to be uploaded to the Adobe Cloud. Adobe
then manages sending emails to esigners, their signature etc. In nutshell, it
was no interaction with SharePoint OnPremise. ( in fact it has some, but
certainly not wrt Nintex WF )
So we ended
up writing our own custom Nintex WF Actions to interact with Adobe Api. I assume if you are reading
this process then you are aware of how Adobe Esign works. If not then read post
2.