Digital signature solutions for e-Document Approval and Workflow
Business Need
Organisations need to exchange documents for the purposes of sign-off and approval either with internal employees or external parties. Such documents include sales contracts, HR documents like expense sheets, mortgage documents, insurance claim forms, consultancy reports etc.
Typically there is a document owner who uploads a document and identifies who needs to approve the document and in which order. The document management system then conducts the workflow notifying each user that they need to approve the document and tracking the document through to completion.
Most current document management systems use a simple approve button to indicate approval – however this provides little proof later that a particular user indeed signed-off on a document. The document approval should instead by given using digital signatures which add trust, integrity, assurance, traceability, audit and ensure legal compliance.
There are two approaches to integrating a secure e-document approval and workflow system:
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Organisation already has a Document Management System (DMS)
Many organisations have already deployed commercial DMS like Microsoft SharePoint® or Xerox DocuShare. In such cases Ascertia recommends the integration of ADSS Go>Sign Applet for secure document viewing and sign-off, and ADSS Server for controlling the process and verification of digital signatures. The ADSS Server / Go>Sign combination has already been integrated by us and our partners with a range of DMS and more can usually be added easily because of the ADSS Server’s simple XML/SOAP web services interfaces.
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Organisations do not already have a DMS
In this scenario Ascertia recommends the use of Ascertia Docs application. This is a specialist document approval and workflow application developed by Ascertia which comes pre-integrated with ADSS Server and Go>Sign Applet. Click here for further information on Ascertia Docs
