Hey everyone! 👋 Niani here—I’m a programmer writer at Docusign and former full-stack engineer.

In September, I hosted an async AMA focused on automating agreement workflows with Docusign APIs.

You all asked some great questions, ranging from authentication and webhook tracking to workflow versioning and resiliency patterns. I’ve pulled together a recap of the top questions here so you can reference them anytime as you build with Maestro.

How does authentication work with Maestro? Can it be linked with SSO, and can data be passed from an identity system?

Answer: Maestro uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication. At the account level, Docusign supports SSO for user login, but Maestro doesn’t automatically pass identity data from your IDM or authentication provider into workflows.

If you need to use attributes from your IDM (like email, employee ID, or group), you can capture those after login and pass them into Maestro as workflow input variables. Maestro can also accept data from systems such as CLM, Power Automate, or an extension app via the Maestro API.

🔗 Learn more about authentication and passing data to workflow variables.

When triggering Maestro workflows from our app, how can we avoid duplicate runs and track workflow status?

Answer: To avoid duplicate workflow runs, generate a correlation ID for each user action (e.g., order-1234) and include it as a starting variable when triggering the workflow. Keep a local mapping {correlationId → workflowInstanceId} in your database, so if a retry occurs, you can check whether a workflow has already been created.

For tracking status, webhooks through Docusign Connect are recommended over polling. Subscribe to workflow events such as workflow-started or workflow-completed for real-time updates. Connect also handles delivery retries automatically.

🔗 Learn more about starting variables and monitoring workflows.

Can Docusign automatically sign a document on behalf of a company?

Answer: No — programmatic signing isn’t supported, as every signature requires an interactive signing ceremony.

However, if your organization must sign, you can use a Docusign eSeal to apply a certified signature programmatically on behalf of your company.

If an eSeal doesn’t fit your use case, you can still prepopulate fields (like company name or contact info) before sending to simplify the sender’s part of the process.

🔗 Explore the Docusign eSeal technical guide and check out the documentation on prepopulating fields.

What resilience patterns does Maestro support for handling transient downstream failures?

Answer: Maestro performs internal retries within most step implementations to handle transient errors automatically. When a step surfaces an error, it has typically already retried several times behind the scenes.

A new capability (coming soon) will allow users to manually retry from a specific step, giving you more control over recovery without restarting the entire workflow.

While Maestro doesn’t yet include circuit breakers or dead-letter queues, it supports pause, resume, and status checks for workflow instances. Docusign Connect also provides automatic webhook retries until your system confirms receipt.

For added resiliency, design your workflow to include escalation or fallback branches when retries are exhausted.

🔗 Read more on Docusign Connect and fallback branches.

How should we handle workflow versioning when evolving from v1 to v2?

Answer: In-flight runs always remain tied to the workflow version they started on — you can’t migrate existing runs to a newer version.

When you publish a new iteration, Maestro automatically increments the version number (e.g., v1.0.0 → v2.0.0 → v3.0.0), and all new runs will use the latest version. Older runs continue on their original version.

Maestro also records the workflow version for each run, which you can retrieve via the API to maintain a clear audit trail of which version handled each agreement.

🔗 Check out the Maestro API Reference and workflow versioning documentation for more details.

👋 Have more questions?

Drop them in the comments below or start a new thread in the Community—we’re happy to help get an answer.

If you want to dive deeper into this topic, check out these resources:

• Getting started with Docusign Maestro
• Triggering workflows programmatically with the Maestro API
• Automate identity checks with Docusign APIs