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Inaugural Event Provides Best Practices from Leading Companies and Insight into Industry Trends 

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Feb. 16, 2012 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced event information for its Adobe® EchoSign® Web Contracts 2012 user conference to be held on Thursday, February 23, 2012 at the Marriott Hotel in San Jose, Calif. Attendees will hear from some of today’s leading business executives and industry analysts, and learn how Adobe EchoSign customers have reduced their entire time-to-signature on contracts from days to 42 minutes on average.

“Adobe EchoSign’s online, paperless contracting solution helps reduce paperwork, streamline administrative processes and enables us to make contracting with care providers easier and faster,” said Tim Kaja, senior vice president of network and provider services for UnitedHealth Group. “Adobe EchoSign is one of many solutions UnitedHealth Group uses to make the health care system more efficient and cost-effective for everyone.”

“E-signature market momentum is steadily growing due to rapidly evolving business process and workflow automation,” wrote Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. “The extra focus on the customer experience gives companies an added impetus to use e-signatures to improve business processes and meet anticipated regulations.”¹

Web Contracts 2012 attendees will be able to attend insightful sessions and learn from EchoSign customers who have leveraged Web contracting to improve their processes and revenue, hear about best practices, and network with key industry analysts and business executives. Speakers from companies such as Meltwater, UnitedHealthcare, and Cigna will highlight their use of e-signatures and offer advice on how to achieve tangible benefits through Web contracting. Session topics will include global Web contracting, compliance issues, EchoSign partner applications, the future of Web contracting and more.

“The majority of contracts are now signed on the Web because of the speed, ease-of-use and cost savings that Web contracts offer,” said Jason Lemkin, vice president of Web business services at Adobe. “This user conference offers attendees the opportunity to delve into the specific uses of Web contracting in a variety of industries and hear real-world examples of increased efficiency and improved processes from customer case studies.”

Acquired by Adobe in July 2011, Adobe EchoSign is the leading electronic signatures and signature automation service with more than 4 million users and 50,000 customers worldwide. Adobe EchoSign is a key component of Adobe’s document exchange services platform for reliably exchanging documents for universal access, review and approval.

For more information and to register for the conference, please visit www.echosign.com.

We’re thrilled to announce that Adobe EchoSign has received the Contract Management AppExchange Best of 2011 award from salesforce.com customers. Salesforce.com annually recognizes top AppExchange partner solutions based on excellent user reviews in a specific calendar year, and for the fourth consecutive year, Adobe EchoSign was recognized by AppExchange customers for its ability to take customer success to new levels in satisfaction and application excellence.

Today, every business of every size is running on the web, ushering in the era of the social contract where the use of electronic signatures transforms the contracting process from painful and arduous into a positive, collaborative process. This customer choice award underscores our commitment to helping businesses leverage the web for all of its social capabilities – ultimately enabling them to increase productivity and close more deals in the cloud.

The Adobe EchoSign for Salesforce solution lets customers easily send contracts for signature directly from their salesforce.com account, and then track their real-time execution status. The moment the contract is digitally signed, all parties receive an emailed copy of the digitally signed contract, and a PDF version is also automatically attached to the relevant Opportunity or Contact for that contract.  With Adobe EchoSign for Salesforce, our customers have taken their entire time-to-signature process from days down to minutes.

You can find Adobe EchoSign for Salesforce on the AppExchange, the world’s most-popular marketplace for business apps at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

By Jason Lemkin

Companies across all industries are finding the switch from paper contracts to Web-based contracts greatly improves customer relationships. Customers are thrilled to adopt more efficient systems where contracts are delivered to them quickly through email. With the ability to sign contracts through mobile devices – further enhanced by our new iOS app – customers face no restrictions on the time and place of signing.

This is especially true for merchants dealing with managed services providers (MSPs). For merchants, especially those with limited resources, e-signatures are a valuable time saving tool. Using digital contracts for merchant card-processing agreements reduces the amount of paperwork and also curbs errors. As any business owner will attest to, these are all important factors in choosing an MSP.

Of course, the benefits of cloud contracting don’t end with customers; vendors reap the rewards, as well. TransNational Bankcard, a merchant processing company, recently started using e-signatures, and its leaders say they will never go back to the outdated ink-on-paper process. The TransNational sales team now uses the time it previously spent tracking down unsigned contracts to focus more on customer service, all while increasing sales. The company prides itself on being merchant-centric, and it is always looking to improve customer relations with its merchant clients.

Using EchoSign resulted in a best-of-both-worlds solution, as TransNational and its clients saw great improvements. After making the switch just two months ago in November 2011, an estimated 80 percent of TransNational’s clients are now using e-signatures to sign their merchant agreements.

In September, we announced EchoSign for Adobe Reader – a first step in the integration of Adobe EchoSign technology with Adobe’s document solutions and services. Today, we are proud to reveal another major milestone that will make it easier than ever for businesses to “seal the deal” and keep up with the demands of a growing mobile workforce.  Now, Adobe Reader users will be able to send PDF files to be signed from within the application as well as sign documents electronically themselves. The new update makes Adobe Reader a one-stop shop for electronic signatures.

With the new update, when you open a PDF document to be signed with Adobe Reader, you will have the option to place a scanned copy of your signature into the document. What if you don’t have the ability to scan an image of your signature? Don’t worry; we have that covered too. Using Adobe EchoSign, you can sign a document yourself by using the “Only I Sign” feature, which gives you the option to either draw in your own signature using a mouse or simply type it in.

When you need to get signatures on a PDF document, simply open it in the new version of Adobe Reader and use the “Send for Signature” button. Your document will automatically be uploaded to Adobe EchoSign, initiating the workflow to get a document signed using Adobe EchoSign. Through the EchoSign UI, you can drag and drop fields on the document for not only e-signatures, but also initials, contact information, company, title, or any other customized form field, before sending the document for signature. You also can get status updates and track the progress of your signature process through the EchoSign UI.

Documents signed using Adobe EchoSign are protected by the Federal E-SIGN Act, which makes online electronic signatures in a commercial transaction equivalent to a written signature so both you and your client can rest assured that signed document is 100 percent legal.

There are many use cases for electronic signatures. Tell us how Adobe EchoSign helps you get the job done faster.

By Jason Lemkin, vice president of Web business services at Adobe 

We’re excited today to announce the immediate availability of the free Adobe EchoSign application for iOS devices.  We realize that you are doing more and more business over your mobile devices and tablets and we’re committed to helping you streamline your business processes and increase productivity.  Now, you can easily get access to your EchoSign accounts and sign documents directly from your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices. The Adobe EchoSign application is available today for free download on the iTunes App Store.

With the Adobe EchoSign app, we’re making it that much easier for you to sign documents and send documents for signing right from your iOS device. Here are some of the things you can do with the new Adobe EchoSign application:

• Send a document for legally-binding eSignature and get documents signed in minutes rather than days.
• Get documents signed instantly on your iPad or iPhone when meeting a signer in person.
• Send documents from an EchoSign library, photo album, email attachment or from other applications.
• Track the status of agreements with real-time status updates.
• View signed agreements stored in your EchoSign account.

What’s more, you can do all this securely. The Adobe EchoSign app offers the same protection for both the sender and the signer during the signing process, including key authentication and privacy, fraud protection, and consumer disclosure.

So download the app at the iTunes Stores. After all, it’s free. Happy Holidays!

By Jason Lemkin, vice president of Web business services at Adobe and former CEO of EchoSign

E-signatures are a huge asset to the education field, especially for a community college system with a limited budget. The California Community Colleges’ Tech Center and California Virtual Campus began using EchoSign’s e-signature solution in February 2010 and saw amazing results. The technology at first was used only internally for invoicing. However, when faced with a project requiring signatures on a memorandum of understanding related to Internet service provision from more than 60 colleges throughout California, the CCC Tech Center turned to e-signatures.

Using the traditional paper method of signing contracts resulted in a turnaround time of about three weeks. “But with EchoSign,” said Bruce Racheter, fiscal and contract manager for the California Virtual Campus, “our average distribute-and-retrieve time was less than a day, with many responses coming in in less than four hours. We even had one document signed, returned and completed in about 45 minutes. That’s a record time for this office.” In the 2010-2011 fiscal year, the CVC and CCC Tech Center processed more than 11,000 documents requiring signatures, so shrinking the turnaround time to just one day saved a great deal of time and money. Employees no longer waste time tracking down missing or late signatures, as they can use EchoSign’s built-in reminder and tracking systems.

Going beyond the cost and time savings, switching to a paperless contracting system also helped the CCC Tech Center achieve their sustainability goals. With a digital system, the use of paper is significantly reduced as contracts don’t need to be printed at each stage, and envelopes and other paper products necessary for mailing aren’t used. Plus, since documents aren’t transported throughout the state, the CCC Tech Center contributes to fuel and vehicle reduction during the mailing process.

The CCC Tech Center experienced the perfect marriage of sustainability and time and cost savings that is possible through e-signature technology. This is just one example of colleges using e-signatures: other universities have seen the results, as well. It won’t be long before schools across the nation get on board and add to the one million contracts that are transacted through EchoSign each month.