Google Docs and Google Drive Now Offering eSignature Open Beta Through Google Workspace

While not groundbreaking, the introduction of an eSignature feature for Google Docs and Google Drive is still significant news. Despite already being offered by third-party apps, the fact that Google’s G Suite has over 2 billion monthly active users makes this development noteworthy. Currently, users have to resort to printing, emailing, scanning, adding a digital photo, or relying on third-party apps to sign documents created on Google Docs. However, this inconvenience is set to change as Google Workspace has now launched the open beta for its eSignature feature.

The feature spent a long time in an alpha release phase where only a very limited number of people had access to it, but now it is available to a larger number of users. But there is a caveat. According to a Google Workspace blog post, “eSignature is available in beta to select Google Workspace customers.” Both group accounts and individual accounts are part of this list.

When announcing the feature, Google said: “For sole proprietors and small businesses, keeping track of contracts, client agreements, and other binding documents can be challenging. To streamline this workflow, we’re integrating eSignature with Google Docs, allowing you to request and add signatures to official contracts directly in Google Docs. It also added that this feature use does not require an additional login.

Google Docs, Google Drive for electronic signature

The feature is straightforward. You get a box where you can add an electronic signature directly. Other features include requesting a signature, checking the status of pending signatures, signing official contracts, and creating a new copy of the contract for each request.

But that’s not all. Google Workspace also aims to add new features in the future. The blog post mentions that the audit trail, a feature that adds an audit trail report of all signatories, will be added. Additionally, the ability to multi-sign a document, request electronic signatures from non-Gmail users, and trigger signatures on PDFs may be added later this year.

Google mentions that the feature will be rolled out within the next 15 days, but there is no word on where the feature will be rolled out globally.