What´s the best way to add signatures to Documents / PDFs inside Aras?

Question

Hi,

we use the Office Connector and also PDF Watermarking for displaying Document States in the resulting PDFs.
Certain Document types now must be signed by additional reviewers. To achive this, the first page of the document contains an area for the various signatures.

One possible option is the use of digital signatures, which can be done by Adobe PDF readers. But this would require a download/reupload of the file.
I wonder if there is also a way to sign documents automatically inside an Aras process?

I assume the Watermark option is probably also suitable for adding signatures, but I haven´t tried this yet and I am not sure if this is recommended.
Does anyone have experience in handling signatures and can give me some best practice tips?

Many thanks!
Angela

christopher_gillis · Answer

Hi Angela,

There doesn't appear to be any standard functionality to support a digital signature, but I have filed this request internally as an enhancement for the Office Connector. One of our Product Managers had some follow up questions to this issue, and may reach out to you directly for further clarification about this use case.

Chris

Christopher Gillis

Aras Labs Software Engineer

wian_le_roux · Answer

Hi Angela, did you get a solution for this? Were looking at the same scenario. Any advise would be appreciated, thanks!&nbsp;
Wian

angela · Answer

Hi Wian,
oh my two year old requests. I really love all of them.&nbsp;

Chris forwarded me to the product manager responsible for Office Connector and we shared&nbsp;some ideas.
My first idea was using the watermarking feature to add some signature-like watermark to the document. I actually made a couple of successful tests and in theory the whole concept would work. But watermarks are no real digital signatures and I was not&nbsp;very happy with the draft as it only allowed static signatures.
Aras was very interesting in the topic of providing&nbsp;"real" digital signatures for Innovator documents. But this one is not an easy topic and my last feedback was, that changes to the Innovator core are required (which basically means they will need some time).

The corresponding request is&nbsp;IR-063503 (&nbsp;OC: Ability to add digital signature to documents) when you want to ask for the current status. The ticket is two years old, but it was updated very often (last time this August!). So there definitely seem to be some kind of progress. But I am not sure if digital signing is on the mid-term roadmap.&nbsp;
Angela

wian_le_roux · Answer

Hi Angela! Thank you so much for the response :) I also hope its in the mid-term roadmap as it would be a super handy feature!&nbsp;
Wian

angela · Answer

Hi Wian,
I want to encourage you (and of course all other Aras customers that have a subscription) to participate in Aras´ current survey that can be seen in the subscriber portal!
Just login to the subscriber portal, somewhere in the announcements you can see this one:
We'd Like Your Feedback - PDF Features in Aras Innovator
Tell Aras that you love digital signing and that this would be a killer feature for PDFs, not matter if their come from Office or TechDocs. If you need more ideas for the rest of the survey -&gt; tell them also that we need much more SPEEEED for their inbuilt PDF viewer. And that the watermark feature has a lot of potential that is currently not used.
If you are busy and don´t have the time to write too much text. Just write everywhere that you pretty much support all ideas that were&nbsp;submitted by this user called "Angela". [emoticon:6d505171faa4497c85c5ca27290c555d]
Best regards!
Angela

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What´s the best way to add signatures to Documents / PDFs inside Aras?

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