The millions of companies that rely on Microsoft Corp.’s and Adobe Systems Inc.’s respective cloud tools now have more reason to use them together.

Today, the two tech giants revealed that they’ve expanded their partnership to build new product integrations aimed at improving workplace productivity. The main focus of the collaboration is Adobe Sign. The e-signature service, which is used by the likes of Mastercard Inc. and Deloitte Ltd., will be made more easily accessible in several key Microsoft products.

At the top of the list is Office 365. Adobe Sign is being integrated with Word, PowerPoint and Outlook, which should enable the company to better target the over 100 million monthly users of Microsoft’s productivity suite.

The e-signature service now works with some of the newer additions to the software giant’s cloud lineup as well. An integration with Flow, the task automation service that Microsoft launched last November, will enable workers to incorporate document signing into their automation workflows. In conjunction, managing files via Microsoft Teams is set to become easier too.

The Slack rival will receive an Adobe Sign app with a tab for approving documents and a bot that can provide information about file status. Over on Adobe’s end, Microsoft Teams has been designated as the “preferred collaboration service” for its Creative Cloud graphic design suite, which includes Photoshop, and it will also be integrated with several other products. 

That last integration is a major win for Microsoft. Despite having the advantage of being integrated with Office 365, its chat service faces an uphill battle against Slack and the ever-expanding lineup of smaller contenders out there. The newest entrant into the race was unveiled just this morning: a service called Stride from Atlassian Corp. Plc that is positioned as a unified hub for team communications.

The new Microsoft Team and Adobe Sign integrations will be rolled out over the coming weeks. In the longer term, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Abhay Parasnis sees their collaboration potentially extending into the realm of artificial intelligence. He wrote in a blog post that his company’s Sensei machine learning engine could be used to help organizations analyze the PDF documents they store on Microsoft services such as OneDrive.

Image: Adobe