Requesting DocuSign Signatures from a Signing Group using Power Automate

In this #PowerShot, I will demo how to configure a setup that can be used for requesting signatures from a DocuSign Signing Group using Power Automate Cloud Flows.

Note: The current DocuSign connector does not support functionality to include Signing Groups as recipients when creating the envelope, adding recipients to an envelope or sending the envelope for signature.

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Let's Get Started

The DocuSign connector in Power Automate allows users to create new envelopes, add recipients to envelopes, add documents to an envelope, retrieve signed documents, restart document signing process and etc. This is quite helpful to automate processes for collecting signatures in various use cases like non disclosure agreements, contracts, proposals and etc. The connector however, provides basic and straightforward actions. The DocuSign API provides additional capabilities for more complex scenarios and we will take a look at one such scenario in this blog post.

We will consider a scenario where a document needs to be signed by a persona in an organization. This does not have to be a single person to whom the document is sent for signature. There are multiple people in the organization that are a part of a group and any member from this group should be able to sign the document. This is very similar to building use cases with Power Automate approvals where any one of the approver can approve the request. In order to implement this, we will use the Signing Groups feature of DocuSign that allows us to add multiple people to a signing group and when an envelope is sent for signature to this signing group, all the members within the group receive an email request for signature and any one member can complete the document signing process.

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Pre Requisites

1. Custom connector for DocuSign: as the current connector for DocuSign does not support adding Signing Groups to an envelope, a custom connector with an action to request e-signature is required. Checkout my video tutorial here to create a custom connector for DocuSign.

2. Signing Group: In the DocuSign settings, a signing group needs to be created and the ID of the group is required to send a document for signature to the signing group. Checkout the DocuSign Signing Group FAQ's here. Sample setup of a Signing Group in DocuSign:
   

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Cloud Flow

We will setup a manually triggered cloud flow through which a file is uploaded for the DocuSign envelope. The custom connector action will be used to send the envelope for signature and a SharePoint list item is created when the envelope is successfully sent.

Step 1: Trigger: Manually trigger a flow - Setup a manual trigger and add an input for uploading a file as shown in the screenshot below.

Step 2: Action: Send envelope DocuSign: This action will be available under the custom connectors tab once the custom connector is published. Select the action and provide the "application/json" for the content type and provide the body as shown in the screenshot below.

Request Body:

{
  "emailSubject": "Contract Signature request",
  "documents": [
    {
      "documentBase64": @{triggerBody()['file']['contentBytes']},
      "name": "Contract",
      "fileExtension": "pdf",
      "documentId": "1"
    }
  ],
  "recipients": {
    "signers": [
      {
        "SigningGroupId": "XXXXX",
        "name": "Signing Group Name",
        "recipientId": "1",
        "routingOrder": "1"
      }
    ]
  },
  "status": "sent"
}

Replace the "XXXXX" with the Signing Group Id from DocuSign and provide the name for the signing group in the request body. If you want to add more signing groups, you can add those objects similar to group 1.

Step 3: Action: Create Item in SharePoint: Add new action to create an item in SharePoint. The configuration for this action is as shown in the screenshot below.

Formulas:

1. Title - CT-@{utcNow('yyyyMMddHHmmss')}

2. Envelope ID: @{body('envelope')?['envelopeId']}

Step 4: Save the Flow.

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Setup in Action

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In this post, we saw how to setup a solution for Requesting DocuSign Signatures from a Signing Group using Power Automate cloud flows. We covered setting up the envelope action using custom connectors in Power Platform to fully utilize the capabilities of DocuSign API.

I hope you found this interesting and it helped you. Thank you for reading!