Streamline End-to-End Agreement Management with Docusign: A Developer Overview

Docusign is widely recognized for pioneering electronic signatures, making it easy for people to sign documents digitally. This shift has saved mountains of paper and helped organizations worldwide store millions of agreements online. However, these digital documents hold valuable data that’s often trapped in static files, such as PDFs, making it difficult for organizations to find, update, or manage them efficiently. Without automation or integration across systems, most organizations rely on manual processes to handle this data—a challenge we call the Agreement Trap—resulting in an estimated $2 trillion lost in global economic value each year.

This problem has inspired our next mission: to help organizations unlock that data and recover that value. Doing so requires creating an entirely new developer platform that improves conversion rates, reduces NIGO (not in good order) by verifying agreement data on entry; enables the business to deeply understand and get insights about their agreement data; and connects agreement data to the business’s systems of record. These are just a few examples of the art of the possible with the new Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management Platform. 

For developers, we are unveiling a significant step in empowering you with the tools to escape the "Agreement Trap". It provides:

• APIs that empower developers to build applications that span all phases of the agreement lifecycle (Create, Commit, Manage).

• Extension apps that enable you to bring your own products and services into Docusign and connect agreement workflows to your own systems of record.

• Maestro, a no-code automation tool for building new or extending existing agreement workflows that you can also integrate into your applications with a single API call.

• Navigator, a digital repository custom-built for storing, organizing, searching and retrieving agreements and extracting data from them based on AI-driven insights, together with the Navigator API (available in beta starting in November), which lets you extract data from documents in the Navigator repository and use it in your own business apps or feed it into Maestro workflows.

These tools build on our existing electronic signature and contract lifecycle management capabilities to enable you to create complete, end-to-end agreement management solutions and unlock the Agreement Trap. Together, they make up what we call Docusign for Developers. 

We designed these tools, and the platform they comprise, to be modular, giving you the flexibility to build efficient, scalable, and customizable solutions. This modularity empowers you to pick and choose from a variety of different components and services across the entire agreement lifecycle, enabling you to actually create solutions that perfectly align with your specific business needs through the following key methods:

• Integrate: Incorporate Docusign functionality into business applications for your company or your customers. 

• Extend: Add your own functionality into Docusign itself, making it available to eSignature and workflow solutions for all Docusign customers.

• Automate: Create and manage complex procedural workflows and control them from your applications.

• Extract: Pull AI-extracted data from agreements for analysis, agreement lifecycle management, and integration with business systems.

• Connect: Join the Docusign Developer Community to exchange ideas and feedback with our engineering and product teams, receive development support and more. 

And you can find all you need to know at the Docusign Developer Center, where you can sign up for a free developer account, learn and explore our APIs and SDKs, download our tools, and discover your own path to the solution you’re after.

Integrate: Scale Efficiently with Our APIs and SDKs

Docusign for Developers is all about giving developers full control over how they incorporate Docusign into their products and applications. We offer REST APIs that support the full agreement lifecycle:  

• Create: The eSignature API offers a flexible composite template model and document generation that enables you to construct customized agreements on the fly with programmatic control. Document generation lets you dynamically read and insert information from your internal systems into those same agreements, customizing them for terms specific to the parties and the use case. Adding Web Forms to your workflows lets you intake data from your recipients and dynamically populate it into agreements for them to sign. 

• Commit: The eSignature API provides many options for specifying documents, signers, conditional recipients, and the ability both to inject data into agreements and take data input from recipients. eSignature also provides options for embedding the signing experience in your application itself or sending agreements via email, SMS or WhatsApp. Our enhanced embedded signing features enable you to incorporate a signature process into your application seamlessly with a simplified UI and matching your own branding so you can create a smooth, consistent signing experience that feels native while leveraging the full capabilities of Docusign eSignature. You can enhance your signature processes to take payments, add digital ID verification and extract that info with the ID Evidence API, and collect multiple signers and documents into a shared space with the Rooms API.

• Manage: Docusign provides developers tools to monitor the progress of agreements, including Docusign Connect, our webhook notification service that pushes Docusign events to your integration so you can track the status and progress of workflows without polling. We also provide the Monitor API, giving you access to security-related events via alerts you can integrate with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools like Splunk or Sumo Logic. The Navigator API, coming in beta November 20, gives you API endpoints to search the Navigator agreement store and extract AI-analyzed data from those agreements to feed your business systems. Docusign also offers the Admin API to let you manage your users, groups, and accounts programmatically.

Extend: Bring Your Products and Services into Docusign to Accelerate Growth

We’re introducing a whole new level of integration with extensibility. Unlike API integrations, which enable developers to incorporate Docusign functionality into an external application, extension apps help unlock the Agreement Trap by making your product experiences usable directly inside Docusign. 

Extension instantiate extension types, which address our customers’ specific cross-product problems and product-specific use cases:

• Data IO: Read and write data to any external source you specify.

• File IO: Import files from and export files to external storage.

• Data verification: Confirm the validity of input for many common data elements, such as bank accounts and their owners, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, Social Security numbers, and business entities (FEIN).

Each of these extension types incorporates a customer experience, which controls how customers interact with the extension app in their Docusign envelopes and Maestro workflows, and a developer experience, which enables developers to specify the actions the extension app will take and how to map those actions to exchange data with external products and services at specific points, called extension points, where those actions can be triggered. 

Implemented typically as cloud-based microservices accessible through a public-facing URL, extension apps are registered in the Docusign Developer Console, now available in all developer accounts, using either a forms-based experience to specify their apps’ properties, or by directly uploading a JSON manifest file which contains those properties’ specifications. 

We also offer extension app reference implementations that serve as models for jumpstarting your own extension app development. Using the Developer Console, developers can test and publish their extension apps privately, to be distributed only to accounts they specify, or publicly, listing them in the Docusign App Center to over 1.6 million Docusign customers for use in their own Docusign envelopes and Maestro workflows. 

Two recent Docusign partner projects illustrate some of the potential of extension apps. Quik!, whose business is all about streamlining forms processing, built an extension app for their FormXtract product that extracts data from forms and incorporates it into a Maestro workflow, giving their customers the combined power of forms processing with agreement process automation. Prisidio, who offers a digital document vault solution for both individuals and business, developed a file archive extension app that automatically stores signed documents into the customer’s digital vault. Visit the App Center to discover the range of extension apps available and get inspired to create your own.

Automate: Boost Productivity and Build Workflows Faster with Maestro

Even with all the power for creating agreement workflows built into the Docusign APIs, it can still be quite complex to build and maintain a custom workflow solution. One workflow might include multiple steps and integrations with several external services, all of which must be maintained in parallel. 

Docusign Maestro is an offering, both for users and developers, that drastically simplifies such complexity. While Maestro offers users an easy, no-code experience for building and managing complex, multi-step workflows, the power of the Maestro API makes it easy for developers to incorporate these workflows into their integrations, as they can use the API to define, trigger, or manage a workflow with a single API call. Imagine reducing all the complexity of a conventional API integration to a single API call! To top it off, the workflow can be changed, updated, and maintained from the Maestro no-code UI without needing to change the integration’s codebase. 

Coming soon, we’ll be introducing the ability to trigger Maestro workflows directly from a completed Docusign envelope, enabling many new conditional use cases.

Maestro workflows can be put to any number of uses; for example: 

• Complete Know-Your-Customer processes to confirm customers’ personal details and store the results in your system of record.

• Confirm customers’ identities and bank account information on new loan applications.

• Export copies of signed agreements to your document store.

• Automate new employee onboarding.

You’re only limited by your imagination.

Extract: Leverage Actionable Insights from Agreement Data 

We’ve talked already about Docusign Navigator, our AI-enhanced smart repository. Navigator is optimized for storing agreements and uses AI to scan the text of agreements, identify and tag data within them, and make that data and metadata searchable and extractable. It also makes the agreements themselves findable through AI-enhanced search on all those same data points. The customer experience for Navigator is already available, with all new agreements signed in Docusign automatically stored in Navigator for our customers’ use. 

The Navigator API, coming in beta November 20, makes the full spectrum of Navigator data open to the developer. With a single call to the Navigator API, developers can pull lists of agreements that match given criteria, extract data sets across agreements, use it for whatever purpose suits their use case, and feed that data into eSignature templates, Web Forms, and Maestro workflows. This enables an entirely new category of applications powered by agreement data and insights.

Connect: Join us in Shaping the Future of Agreements

This brand-new era of Docusign for Developers would not be possible without the feedback and support of developers like you, which is why we launched our Docusign Developer Community — a collaborative space where you can innovate together, exchange ideas, receive the latest product and event updates and get support from both our technical teams and your fellow developers. 

Our commitment to building an ecosystem that empowers developers is our top priority. We’re cultivating an Agreement Economy that reimagines agreements as dynamic, automated workflows that deliver real business outcomes. This gives developers the opportunity to access new revenue streams and revolutionize how businesses manage their agreements. 

Unlock What’s Possible

Watch on-demand our inaugural developer event, Docusign Discover, showcasing all these technologies and unveiling what’s next for developers and our vision for the future of intelligent agreement management. In they keynote, hear from expert speakers, including Patrick Chanezon, VP of Cloud Developer Advocacy at Microsoft, Allan Thygesen, Docusign CEO, Robert Chatwani, Docusign President of Growth and more, and see real-world applications from our partners driving growth and efficiency.

The fun doesn’t stop there. Participate in our global online hackathon: Unlocked. With up to $50,000 in prizes, put your creativity and skills to the test and unlock agreement innovation.

We’re Excited to See What You’ll Build Next

To start building with our suite of APIs and tools, visit these resources:

• Explore the Docusign Developer Center to learn more and sign up for a free developer account.

• Check out our tools to help you get started on your development journey.

• Join the Docusign Developer Community for support and to connect with other developers.

• Check out our Partner Program, designed to support systems integrators and independent software vendors, no matter your business model. Whether you’re developing solutions for your own organization or for clients, our program has you covered.