Foldr Sign sends a document out for signature from the storage it already lives in, and puts the signed copy back beside it when everyone has signed. People sign from a link in an email, without an account, and colleagues sign with their usual Foldr sign-in. As an administrator you decide who may send, from which shares, and what Foldr records about the result.
This article describes Foldr 11.1. For sending and signing, see Sending a document for signature.
What you’ll need before you start
A Sign licence. On Foldr Cloud, Sign is part of the Enterprise plan, and can be added to Business as an extra. On the appliance it comes with a Folio licence, or as a Sign licence of its own. If the Send for signature permission described below isn’t offered on your shares, Sign isn’t licensed yet; get in touch and we’ll arrange a trial.
Working email. Every signer is invited by email, so your Foldr has to be able to send it. On Foldr Cloud that’s already done; on the appliance, see Configuring the Foldr server to send Email and send yourself a test before anybody relies on it.
On the appliance, a way to write back. When the last person signs, the signed copy is written to the share by the share’s service account rather than by the sender. Most shares have one already; a share that only connects as the signed-in user (an SMB share using Kerberos, for example) needs one set up before signed copies can land there. Configuring service accounts covers it. The signed copy is also produced by the background queue, which runs as part of a normal install; if completed envelopes seem to hang, that’s the thing to check.
If the licence ever lapses, envelopes already out for signature can still be signed and completed. Nobody can send new ones.
Who can send for signature?
Sending is a permission on each share rather than a global switch, because a document can only be sent from somewhere the sender is trusted to send from. In Foldr Settings, open Shares, choose the share, and on its Access page find Send for signature in the Sharing group. Grant it to the people or groups who send documents from that share.
That permission decides three things:
- Which documents a sender can pick. The file picker in Sign only offers PDFs on shares where they hold it.
- Where signed copies can appear, since each one is saved next to the document it came from.
- Whether they can invite people outside your organisation. Holding Send for signature on any share lets a sender type in an email address, and Foldr creates an external account for that person so their signature can be tied to them.
A reasonable start is the teams who actually send agreements (HR for contracts, the office for supplier terms, finance for purchase orders), each on its own share.
Filling custom fields from signed documents
When an envelope completes onto a share, Foldr can write parts of the result onto the signed PDF as custom field values, so you can search for everything a particular person signed, or everything signed last month.
In Foldr Settings, open the share, go to its custom fields and edit a field. The Foldr Sign section has a Role list:
| Role | Suits a field of type |
|---|---|
| Signature | signature |
| Initials, Signed by, Signer name, Signer email | text |
| Signed on | date |
| Signed (yes/no) | yes/no |
Each role can only be given to one field per share. Custom Fields covers creating the fields themselves.
The emails Sign sends
Sign sends five emails, and all of them appear under Personalisation > Notifications in Foldr Settings, where you can give different groups their own wording:
- Signing Invitation, to each signer. Reminders reuse it. Senders can override its subject for a particular envelope.
- Signing Cancellation, to the people invited, when the sender cancels.
- Envelope Declined, to the sender, with the signer’s reason if they gave one.
- Envelope Completed, to the sender (saying where the signed copy was saved) and to each signer (with a link to it).
- Bulk Envelope Completed, to the sender once every copy in a batch has been signed.
The emails carry links rather than attachments, so the signed document never travels by email.
What gets recorded
Every completed envelope carries a Certificate of Completion as its last page: who signed, how they were identified (a Foldr sign-in for colleagues, the emailed link for everyone else), the IP address and browser they signed from, when they viewed, consented and signed, the consent wording they agreed to, and a timestamped audit trail of the whole envelope.
Sign also writes six events to your activity log under Sign (an envelope created, sent, completed, cancelled, declined and expired unsigned), all switched on by default. The per-signature detail stays with the envelope and on the certificate rather than in the activity log.
Envelope records and their audit trails are kept for seven years from when the envelope was created, and are then removed. The signed PDFs themselves are ordinary files on your shares, and Sign never deletes them, so the certificate page travels with the document for as long as you keep it.
What kind of signature is this, legally?
Sign produces simple electronic signatures: the kind recognised under eIDAS in the EU, UK law, and the US ESIGN Act and UETA, and the kind most everyday agreements need (employment contracts, supplier terms, consent forms, purchase orders). It doesn’t produce advanced or qualified electronic signatures, and it doesn’t apply a digital signature to the PDF.
We’ll be honest that this rules some documents out. If your legal team says a particular class of document needs an advanced or qualified signature, or a signer’s identity checked against a passport, Sign isn’t the tool for those today. For everything else, the certificate is what you’d produce if a signature were ever questioned.
One consequence of signing from an emailed link is worth passing on to your senders: the link is the signer’s key. Anyone holding it can open the document, and once it’s signed, download the signed copy. Treat signing links like the documents they point at.