Seamless Document Management with CentricMinds & DocuSign

Your document management sovereignty could determine your success, or your survival. Such a bleak statement requires some explanation. Imagine that every document you rely on for your business to function is compromised. What’s your backup strategy? Having an enterprise file management solution, even if you’re only 30 people or less, is fundamental for ensuring your knowledge and expertise is secure.

Content generation and publishing has exploded in the last ten years. By the end of 2020, its estimated by the World Economic Forum that there will be 44 Zettabytes of data stored on the internet. If that number is correct, then it translates to 40 times more bytes of information stored on Earth than there are stars in the observable universe.

This figure will continue to grow as more people are now working from home and relying on their own personal computing environment to perform work. This situation has only accelerated the need for working from home (WFH) team members to be accessing a secure Document Management repository that provides secure document storage and access to ensure confidentiality and assurance of access for all team members.

CentricMinds Document Management is your trusted source of truth

Many of our customers rely on CentricMinds to securely manage their operational content. This includes a variety of document, media and transactional based content. CentricMinds Drive is a powerful enterprise document management solution that supports from small to very large document collections. With Active Directory and Azure AD integration support, organizations are able to securely provision access to CentricMinds Drive for their users.

CentricMinds Drive is an intuitive enterprise document management environment for managing all of your content. Integrations with Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are also supported.

Key features of CentricMinds Drive include:

• Document Versioning with ‘Compare’ feature, allowing users to view changes made between chosen versions of Office and PDF documents
• Document Tagging, allowing users to view other documents associated with the same tags
• Enterprise Search with content and metadata indexing, allowing users to search within the contents of documents
• Digital Asset Management tools which allow users to crop and adjust images within the document repository
• Folder and permission management tools provided for Administrators to modify the Drive hierarchy and define both view and author permissions at the folder level

CentricMinds Drive also supports integration with Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive allowing you to aggregate and manage your content located across different cloud storage environments from one, intuitive interface.

One key benefit of this integration with other cloud storage environments is the ability to share or make access available to these documents without the need to provide direct access with associated user accounts. For example, you can share documents stored within Microsoft SharePoint via CentricMinds Drive without needing every user accessing them to have a user account / subscription / license in SharePoint (potentially a significant cost benefit).  

Digital Signatures accelerate document workflows

Many organizations still pass documents around via email. This insecure protocol doesn’t protect control over the integrity of the documents being shared, or the ability to authenticate and/or track the users with whom the email is being shared with. Additionally, the documents being accessed for digital signing should only be accessed from a secure repository in order to validate the integrity of the document.

CentricMinds native digital signatures enable organizations to perform the following:

• Create secure forms that enable managers to send to end users (employees, suppliers, business partners, contractors, etc.) for completion
• End users can complete these forms and even attach documents
• CentricMinds Workflow will capture and send to approvers the completed form and associated documents for review and acceptance
• CentricMinds digital signatures are a browser based signing technology that allows approvers to sign with trust that a form submission or workflow process has been completed successfully

CentricMinds provides its own native digital signing service which administrators can apply to any form developed using the form building tools.

• The end result is both the completed form and the attached documents are saved to the CentricMinds Drive with a digital signature enclosed
• Documents stored within CentricMinds Drive are made available to authenticated users, using secure HTTPS access, providing confidentiality and assurance for all users

Completed form submissions which include digital signing steps are automatically captured and generated into PDF’s for previewing from within CentricMinds Drive. Using workflow, administrators can also notify team members when certain forms are completed and signed.

Automate Document Workflows through DocuSign integration

DocuSign has become the household brand for digital signatures. While CentricMinds provides a native digital signing service for authenticating form submissions within your site, DocuSign is recognized as the industry standard for eSignature technology and provides configurable authentication options, a digital audit trail and backed up with bank-grade security.

Given the myriad of organizations already using DocuSign to manage document authentication, it was natural for CentricMinds to support integration with DocuSign’s eSignature technology so that documents managed by CentricMinds could support an existing DocuSign workflow.

Following is a typical process that highlights the integration with CentricMinds Drive and DocuSign eSignatures:

• A CentricMinds administrator generates a form for completion by an external party (supplier, contractor, customer, etc.) and chooses approver(s) of the process.
• A link to complete the form is sent to the external party
• The external party completes the form and also attaches a document
• The approver(s) are notified (via email and/or mobile app push notification)
• The approver(s) review the provided data using the link provided in the notification and are seamlessly taken to DocuSign to complete signing / approval  
• The approver signs the form and document using DocuSign eSignature technology
• The external party receives confirmation that their submission has been signed
• The signed form submission and document are published into the CentricMinds Drive for reference