Verifying the state of your organizational documents once meant combing through long, complicated audit logs. With Laserfiche digital signatures, you can automatically sign and validate your documents as they are created, reviewed and archived without leaving the Laserfiche environment. Digital signatures are a form of electronic signatures that act like a digital notary to your electronic assets, allowing you to verify the condition of your documents for the duration of their lifecycle, be it days or decades.
Unlike other electronic signatures, digital signatures are outwardly verifiable and use a trusted root authority to validate user signatures. A public-private key pair system provides a reliable method for verifying document contents throughout review and approval. Digital signatures may be applied to any type of document—including PDFs, scanned pages, electronic documents or images and entire briefcases— within both the Laserfiche Desktop Client and Laserfiche Web Access. By validating documents in Laserfiche, organizations are able to accelerate their mission-critical business processes, decrease operational costs and ensure compliance standards.
The digital signatures feature in Laserfiche also forms a critical component of Laserfiche’s Victorian Electronic Record Strategy (VERS) certification as well as E-Certification Act conditions in the United States. VERS provides standards for reliably and authentically preserving electronic records. It is endorsed by the State Government of Victoria, Australia, and is accepted and used by archival institutions around the world.
The Laserfiche Advantage:
- Establish User Credentials
- Perform Trusted Validation Checks
- Validate Document Contents
- Optimize Business Processes
Establish User Credentials
Digital signatures employ public-private encryption key pairs and associated certificates given to individual users, offering a unique method of electronic identification for those working with your documents.
- No two keys are identical, providing exclusive credentials to anyone within your organization who has access to the Laserfiche system.
- Users may apply their signatures to the document as a whole without affecting the document’s contents. This action marks the document as signed by that user and provides a baseline for future comparison that can be used to determine if any changes were made to the document.
- Every user’s signature certificate is stored as a local copy in the Laserfiche repository and Server for future verification checks.
Verify and validate document authenticity with tamper-proof digital signatures.
Perform Trusted Validation Checks
Because each signature provides an individual identification connected to a valid certificate authority, you can establish with certainty that a document was signed by one particular key. Validation checks through this trusted root authority offer a straightforward method for assessing the authenticity of a signature.
- After signing, the signature applied to the document is validated against the certificate stored in the Laserfiche repository, proving that the signature on the document matches that associated with the signer.
- Laserfiche offers non-repudiation of signature origin by retrieving user information and signature details, such as date of signing, who signed the document and reasons for associated signatures.
- Other users may also countersign documents, which indicates further approval of the document or approval of the existing signature.
Click on a signature to view its certificate information and more details.
Validate Document Contents
By proving the authenticity of signatures, the validation checks allow you to examine whether a document’s contents and images exist in the same state they were in when the original signature was applied.
- After a digital signature is applied to a document or briefcase, changes to the document’s images or electronic files will invalidate the signature during validation checks.
- Changes to other elements of the document, such as metadata and annotations, do not invalidate the signature, allowing users to add information for retrieval, and route documents through business processes without having to sign them again.
Modifying a document's contents will invalidate previously applied digital signatures.
Optimize Business Processes
When used within the Laserfiche Workflow, Client and Web Access environments, digital signatures help automate critical business processes, such as complex review activities. Applying and validating digital signatures helps users securely review, approve, deny or otherwise take action on content.
- Digital signatures may be automatically applied to imported documents, marking documents as valid upon capture.
- Users may countersign proposals, contracts and other documents to indicate approval.
- Laserfiche can apply, validate and remove digital signatures from a group of documents, allowing you to work quickly with documents in bulk.
- Instituting digital signatures reduces operational costs related to printing.
Use Workflow activities to automatically apply, retrieve, or remove signatures from a document.
Meet Compliance Standards
When configured properly, digital signatures may help ensure compliance with a number of domestic and international regulations for e-Governance. It is important to note that achieving full accordance with these regulations depends on instituting the correct document management processes and procedures when using the digital signatures function.
Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Compliance |
YES |
|
CFR Part 11 FDA Compliance |
YES |
|
Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Compliance |
NO |
|
Victorian Electronic Record Strategy (VERS) |
YES |
|
Clinton E-Signatures Act |
YES |
|
Additional Resources
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