PDF Sign&Seal brings enhanced digital signature, time-stamping and strong encryption capability to PDF documents. It has been specifically designed for busy managers who need to easily sign or protect a business document, be it a purchase order, an invoice, a report, a proposal, compliance statement or assessment review. It provides unparalleled flexibility for designing your very own friendly visible signatures block that can include hand-signature images, company seals and other data items, making it ideal for signing engineering and architectural drawings.

Enables you to create PDF files from Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, TIF images, AutoCAD, Visio and many other document or file types using a print driver or via right click operations. Multiple files can be handled automatically so that you don't need to separately open and convert each file. .

Using the PDF Sign&Seal right-click functionality or the PDF Sign&Seal Make printer driver you can convert various file types to PDF documents and then digitally sign the PDF in a single operation. As before, you can also create and sign multiple PDFs in one operation.

You can configure the workflow of what happens after you create a PDF. You choose to have it signed (including embedding of timestamp), and/or sealed and attached to email for delivery to your recipients as a single seamless operation.

You have complete control over precise signature appearance to be stamped on your PDFs - an important requirement for tailored signature appearance in many fields. No other software provides same level of flexibility in defining signature appearance items, their size, shape and positions, text font, size and colour, whether to include borders and many more options. The inbuilt design utility makes it easy to drag/drop and resize signature appearance items.

You can save one or more signature profiles (called preferred signing locations). This makes it easy to sign standard business documents that always need to be signed in the same place and using the same style. The exact location and appearance can be defined and remembered using names that you defined such as “invoice signature”, “drawing approval signature”, “Report approval”. You can also automatically create blank signature fields on multiple pages. Certified signatures are supported as well as visible and invisible signatures.

You can either sign the first page, last page, all pages or user selected pages in one operation in your preferred signing location. You can also change dynamically the page selection as required. This saves a lot of time and effort and creates a much more intuitive user interface.

Create long term signatures with embedded cryptographic timestamps (provided by a RFC3161 Time Stamp Authority) and also embed the signer's certificate status at the time of signing (provided by a RFC2560 OCSP responder). Such long term signatures can be verified in the future even after signer's certificate expires or is revoked.

PDF encryption enables the author to control who can open the document and define the access rights of that user, e.g. whether or not printing is allowed, cut/paste is allowed etc. PDF Sign&Seal supports both password-based encryption as well as strong certificate based encryption of PDFs. It is easy to define recipient groups and thus seal PDF documents for the entire group. In additional each member of the group can have their individual access rights set.

PDF Sign&Seal supports the filling of form fields and allows these to be saved locally without reliance on any other software. In comparison other PDF readers/viewers do not allow you to fill in PDF forms and save them locally. This is a problem when working off-line or when filling in a form over a period of time or if you wish to retain a copy of the completed form locally for your own records.

PDF Sign&Seal maintains an history file which records all signing and sealing operations performed by the user. It records the date/time of signing (or sealing), who performed the action, output file location and success/failure of the operation.

PDF Sign&Seal supports advanced verification of digital signatures including ability to do historical signature verification and checking of signer's certificate status using CRLs and/or OCSP. For highest levels of security and policy management PDF Sign&Seal can be used in conjunction with ARP Enterprise Edition.

PDF Sign&Seal is completely standards based and therefore PKI neutral. It can use certificates from any Certificate Authority, retrieve CRLs and OCSP from any standards compliant certificate status provider, and work with any standards compliant Time Stamping Authority. The PDFs produced by PDF Sign&Seal are 100% compliant with the PDF specifications and can be opened and verified in any PDF software which is compliant with the PDF specifications.

PDF Sign&Seal can use either software keys, smart cards and USB tokens for signing and encryption purposes. PDF Sign&Seal uses the Windows® keystore for accessing keys, so any smartcard/USB token that works with Windows® should work with PDF Sign&Seal.

PDF Sign&Seal has been designed to be compliant with a range of digital signature legislation and regulatory frameworks, including EU law (EU Directive for Electronic Signatures), EU Directive for E-Invoicing, IdenTrust, US Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign), The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), 21 CFR Part 11(a regulation governing the use of electronic signatures within the pharmaceutical industry), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and others.

PDF Sign&Seal is standalone application and does not require any third party software (e.g. Adobe® Acrobat® or even free Adobe Reader®). The PDF documents do not need to have any special privileges to enable signing capability. This dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership of this advanced digital signature solution.

The development roadmap of PDF Sign&Seal includes various enhanced features. Ascertia is responsive to customer feedback and project requests and we look forward to hearing from our current and prospective customers. For further details contact sales@ascertia.com

Current roadmap items include:

PDF Sign&Seal will be enhanced to support the compliant signing of PDF/A format documents