Introducing HelloSign for Google Docs | Hacker News Reader

Introducing HelloSign for Google Docs

hellosign.com

Interesting, I've been happy using Preview.app for signatures by just downloading/saving as pdf and signing it through there. It's not as seamless as doing it online through this, but at least it's secure and easy to do, and Apple's had it available for a couple years now. I guess it's not much of a pain point for me to find another solution. Also, the fact that you have to use your mouse to sign it ensures a pretty crappy signature every time.

Thanks for the feedback! In our standalone app (hellosign.com) you can type out a signature with our stock fonts and reuse it in your Docs add-on.

+1 for Preview.app signatures. It's like magic. I hadn't had a 'wow' moment with any out-of-the-box OSX software until I set it up - but it's awesome.

Joseph here, cofounder of HelloSign.

Appreciate the feedback. We have a lot more signing options on HelloSign.com. For example, you can create a signature on HelloSign.com by:

1. Using your smartphone

2. Uploading a signature image

3. Typing it in

4. Drawing it in

For V1 of the Google Docs integration, we only added the draw it in option for Docs Add-ons. The other types are coming. Either way, if you want to upload a signature, you can still do it on our website and it’ll show up in Google Docs as saved.

Preview is useful, but there are a few reasons people still use us:

1. We’re closer to the documents than Preview

- You can sign directly in Google Docs, Gmail (https://www.hellosign.com/gmail), Google Apps, and elsewhere.

2. We do signature work flows.

- You can request signatures, cc key parties (like a cofounder or lawyer) and other business functionality.

3. We’re cloud based

- You can use us anywhere.

The feature he's saying is that mac os preview allows you to take a picture of a piece of paper with your signature on, and then places that in the pdf. You should implement this - or at least try it. There's no dragging mouse that will be ever be close to how natural this feels.

Disclosure: I'm a happy HelloSign user.

This is what HelloSign has done since the beginning. Take a picture with your phone, send the signature in, and you can attach it to most anything. It sounds like it's not directly exposed in the Google docs addon, but you can still jump to the full app to do it.

Does it work the same as Preview? Preview actually detects my signature on the page I'm holding up and creates a vectorized version of it automatically. It's not just a photo.

Man.. not having been on OSX long discovering little things like this always puts a smile on my face, thank you!

Wait, so it's not a digital cryptographic signature...it's just like an image of your handwritten signature stamped on a document? Does that have some kind of magic legal force?

It just saves you the pain in the ass of some other party wanting you to print, sign, scan in and send it back to them.

Well someone could forge your "offline" signature too. Unless there is a notary public or other unimpeachable witness involved (I don't think HelloSign qualifies), signatures are a bit murky. IANAL, but courts could use common sense and say contracts signed in this way are binding for small debts between acquainted parties but not for large ones between total strangers.

> Wait, so it's not a digital cryptographic signature...it's just like an image of your handwritten signature stamped on a document? Does that have some kind of magic legal force?

People seem to believe they do, at the very least. I've never signed documents with anything but my signature, some electronically with a print-sign-scan-email.

My rental agreement with my current landlord was a bit different: it was electronic (the document was on a website), and you clicked various "signature" lines, which inserted your name, and what looked like some sort of cryptography signature. (There were some hexadecimal bytes, and a pretty little ribbon picture.) I never supplied my key to the site, so I'm inclined to say it's the website's key signing my clicking of the button, which I think probably worthless since it doesn't answer the question of who is signing the document, which is the important thing, but hey, Encryption! Signature! Bits!

Yup! They're legally binding based on the eSignatures act passed in 2000. For more info, check out the link here: http://www.hellosign.com/electronic-signature

disclaimer: BD @ HelloSign

The cryptographic implementations are usually called "digital signatures", while this sort of thing is usually called an "electronic signature". Engineers understand the differences and pros/cons, but end users really just want a picture of a signature and don't want to learn about certificates and PKI.

That really depends on the country. For example, in Austria there's the "Buergerkarte" which is essentially a smartcard that can apply digital signatures. Your public key on that card is certified by a government agency. If you want to submit government forms you can either sign them and send the original document via postal mail, or you can use the Buergerkarte to cryptographically sign a PDF file that you can submit via the Internet. As far as I know things like copies of physical signatures won't be accepted.

I'm sure you're right, I should have specified that the end users I've spoken to have all been in the US.

It's just as cryptographically secure as signing a paper document and scanning it in. And yes it does: http://electronicsignature.com/esignact/

When you click on the "buy now" button on any website, you're exerting a similar magical force.

Interesting. I've been using EchoSign (http://www.echosign.com) for years without complaints, but I don't think their UI has been updated much since being acquired by Adobe a while ago.

Joseph here, cofounder of HelloSign.

Another integration we have that's unique to HelloSign is the ability to sign documents directly in Gmail. It’s one of my favorite integrations we’ve built:

https://www.hellosign.com/gmail

It's my favorite too! Unfortunately it's broken in Gmail's latest UI update :/

Appreciate it Nathan!

Gmail pushed out a new UI and we had to hustle to accommodate the new changes. Since they don’t have an official API that would let us add the ‘sign’ button, we have to move fast when they update the UI. Any change can trigger an all nighter for us. So, there was a brief gap between their new UI and our update to fix it. Sorry about that!

Either way, the UI issue should be resolved. Please email support at hellosign dot com if you see any issues.

Thanks Joseph. This made me interested in giving it a try (I sent about 1 - 3 docs for signature each week), but this stopped me in my tracks:

"Add HelloSign to Gmail? It can:

- Access your data on all websites

- Access your tabs and browsing activity"

I'll give the regular HelloSign a try, but no way would I add an extension with those permissions.

Chrome Exstension permission names are incredible broad and not very granular - and there's nothing that extension devs can do about it: https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/186213?hl=...

For example, want to access the DOM from your extension? You'll trigger a 'Your Data on all websites' warning, whatever it is you're actually doing: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8550/why-do-chro...

"This app would like to: ... Allow this application to run when you are not present ..."

No, thanks. It will also cost if I sign more than 3 documents per month.

The phrasing is misleading. The add-on cannot run without you present. In order to fetch the document without any formatting problems we needed to use ScriptService which causes this permissions prompt.

Thank you for indicating this bug.

Rest assured! We don't automatically charge you - at 3 documents you're notified that you've reached your document limit for the month. You'd have to directly go into our dashboard and add your credit card and sign up for the premium plan (with 30-day free trial) for pricing to take effect.

I see it requests both these permissions: - View and manage the files and documents in your Google Drive - View and manage documents that this application has been installed in

The second one seems reasonable. But the first has this description: "Upload, download, update, and delete files in your Google Drive Create, access, update, and delete native Google documents in your Google Drive Manage files and documents in your Google Drive (e.g., search, organize, and modify permissions and other metadata, such as title)"

That sounds like full access to every document in my google drive. No thank you!

I've been using HelloSign since the beginning, and don't really sign my documents any other way if I can avoid it. This may be more relevant in the legal space, where I've had to sign and fax things way too often, but just being able to do everything online in a simple, clean, interface is a major improvement. Looking forward to using this in Google Docs.

Thanks so much for the kind words Jacob!

Is there a new API for Google Docs I haven't heard about?

It looks like Google Docs might finally be ready to go after Microsoft Office in the enterprise, now that they have an API to beat out Visual Basic for Applications.

Yes!

Add-ons have been released: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/add-ons/

Awesome! Anything to get rid of paper from my workflow. Not so much about the environment (though, that's good too). But dealing with paper is such a productivity killer.

It doesn't appear to be in Google Apps Marketplace for businesses yet. ETA? I have a few clients that would be interested in using this.

--Edit--

It is available for businesses. First verify the domain's Drive settings -> "Allow users to install Google Docs add-ons". Then "Manage Apps" in the individual Drive account.

http://monosnap.com/image/M05IeqhZWU4HVEfZ96GXzvLKx3zXa3

sending you an email!

I don't see this sort of product exlanding the market for Docs significantly.

A hundred bucks per user per year is not an unreasonable business proposition. Yet part of the attraction of Google Docs is that it's free as in hog pens and slop troughs and there seems to be an impedance mismatch which only grows as a user winds up with several third party tools of congruent utility and similar cost.

So I'd like to make it easy for clients to sign sales contracts. I see a lot of companies using DocuSign or EchoSign for this. Is the advantage of HelloSign the integration it has with various services like Google Docs? (Well, and it also appears to be cheaper.) Is that helpful even if clients don't want to install any plugins or apps?

Yes! Not only on the price point and the Docs add-on, we're the sole e-signature service to offer a direct gmail plugin to sign within your inbox (http://www.hellosign.com/gmail) and your clients don't need to sign up for anything or download anything to sign. With our API (http://www.hellosign.com/info/api) you can even build a seamless experience (Iframe overlayed on your website).

If you have any other questions feel free to reach out to e-mail me: ed [at] hellosign [dot] com

Umm... since these signs are "legally binding" therefore these require atleast as much security as a user's passwords, no? So exactly what security measures are in place?

With a typical text password, you don't even store it in plain-text, for fear of a compromised DB. So how are you protecting these signatures against a compromised DB?

My only comment so far is that the sign-in button doesn't conform to the Google+ Branding Guidelines.

https://developers.google.com/+/branding-guidelines

Thanks for that! We'll get it over to the team.

from http://www.hellosign.com/info/legal

"HelloSign authenticates document signers so you know who is signing your documents. Any person signing a document must either have login information for HelloSign, or have received in their email account a request for signature."

Do you verify the e-mail receiver as being the correct person? How does this work with the law?

Great question - we verify that the user owns the e-mail address by verifying they have access to it - essentially when we e-mail them a link they have to click to get access to the document on HelloSign. We also log their IP address and browser, it may seem like a low bar but we feel it's inherently more secure than in real life where people fax documents to shared machines and mail items to shared/unsecured addresses. For Google Accounts, we trust Google to verify they own the e-mail address via OpenID.

For our standalone product @ http://www.hellosign.com you can also add a second layer of authentication by using a signer PIN that you can set and send to the signer via a different method (phone call, text message, alternate e-mail address).

So, if I had to go to court and the non-account signer said they didn't receive the e-mail and were not the one to sign it, what would you do to prove they were indeed the signer?

All documents are provided with an audit trail of when the different parties view the document and other relevant info. This method of verification is standard across the different e-signature providers. Feel free to contact me if you have other questions at ed [at] hellosign [dot] com

As much as I realize why it's required, I'm not going to give permissions to view/edit all my Google docs.

Is this something RightSignature can do?

Joseph here, cofounder of HelloSign.

No, they don’t have an integration with Google Docs Add-ons.

How are you different from PandaDoc?

We allow self-signing documents which PandaDoc doesn't. Outside of Google Docs add-ons we're also the only e-signatures provider that has a direct Gmail plugin integration (https://www.hellosign.com/gmail). We also have an API for developers to integrate the signing workflow seamlessly into their app.

HelloFax/Sign doing some neat things but needs to figure out if it is 2 services or 1.

And what's with the 1300 pixel wide pages?

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