CoSign Digital Signatures with SharePoint

Organizations around the world and across industries have invested in Microsoft® SharePoint® for automating their business processes. This investment has resulted in streamlined processes, reduced organizational costs, and improved collaboration and efficiency. However, when the need for a signature arises, organizations that have not implemented a digital signature solution are forced to resort back to paper. This disruption in the electronic workflow minimizes the benefits of the investment in automation, while increasing organizational costs and bringing your business to a halt.

CoSign® is the only digital signature solution seamlessly integrated with Microsoft SharePoint. This enables users to easily approve, accept, and audit legally enforceable documents, list items, and records that are centrally located on the SharePoint server - and do so via desktop, laptop, web browser, and mobile devices. CoSign is compatible with all major document types including PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel®, and InfoPath®. Further, CoSign allows compliance with regulations worldwide, meeting the needs of organizations in the most tightly-regulated industries.

CoSign digital signature capability with Microsoft SharePoint is available in three structures suited to your signing needs: 

• CoSign Standard Support for SharePoint. This out-of-the-box CoSign capability provides users with a rich set of digital signature features for document managed by SharePoint solutions, including Word, Excel, InfoPath and PDF. These advanced features include native support for Microsoft Office and protection against document corruption when signed Office documents are checked into SharePoint. Additional features include signature clearing rules, sectional signing, reason code management, configurable signature blocks, graphic-signature image management, and signatures that are backward compatible across different versions of Microsoft Office. Users may sign any document type using CoSign prior to checking it into SharePoint, and may also leverage CoSign’s sign and save (WebDAV) feature to sign PDF documents and save them back to SharePoint servers in one step. 
• CoSign Add-on for SharePoint. The CoSign add-on for SharePoint enables users to seamlessly sign documents centrally located on the SharePoint server, as well as SharePoint list items, without requiring any software installation on the client machine. All of the major document types are supported, including PDF, InfoPath, Microsoft Word, and Excel.  CoSign also supports built-in and third-party SharePoint workflow solutions such as Nintex workflow. The add-on supports digital signing via desktop and laptop, as well as a variety of smartphones and tablets.
• CoSign SAPI® SDK. CoSign’s high-level Signature API (SAPI) was designed with the SharePoint application developer in mind. Whereas other basic cryptographic APIs like MS CAPI or PKCS#11 require extensive programming and crytographic knowledge, with SAPI, integration is simple. The developer need not be an expert in the details of information security to add a robust digital signature capability to the SharePoint application. SAPI enables your product to get to market faster with standard digital signature features that enable compliance with industry and regional regulations.  CoSign SAPI delivers digital signature support for desktop, Web, and server applications.  With SAPI SDK you can choose from C DLL, COM Object, or Web Services API. SAPI is routinely used by developers under: .NET, C/C++/C#, VB, Delphi, JavaScript, and PHP.

• PDF signing within SharePoint. CoSign is the only solution that enables signing PDF and PDF/A documents from within the SharePoint environment without requiring software installation on the client machine.
• InfoPath signing. CoSign users can seamlessly sign InfoPath forms in SharePoint with neither CoSign nor InfoPath installed on the client machine.
• Microsoft Office signing. CoSign enables digital signing of MS Office documents from within the SharePoint environment without the need to check documents out of SharePoint.
• Support for SharePoint Mobile Access. CoSign supports digital signing of SharePoint list items and documents via a variety of mobile devices including iPads, iPhones, android-based phones, pads, tablets, and others.
• Support for third-party workflows. CoSign supports workflow solutions with a SharePoint foundation including Nintex workflow.
• Sequential approval processes. CoSign enables multiple signatures to be placed on a document (one after the other) while ensuring document integrity.
• Compliance. CoSign digital signatures allow compliance with standards of the most tightly regulated industries and geographies.
• Authorized signer control. CoSign leverages your existing user management systems (e.g., Microsoft Active Directory®, Oracle® OID/OVD, IBM Tivoli®, etc.), allowing your organization to control signer privileges via pre-existing systems and policies for user management and authentication. The organization’s policies for adding and removing employees are securely translated by CoSign for management of signature privileges.
• Native support for Microsoft Office and InfoPath. CoSign is the only solution that provides backward compatible signatures across different versions of Microsoft Word and Excel including Office XP/2003/2007/2010. Furthermore, CoSign provides signature rules required by regulated markets, as well as reason-code management, sectional and interdependent signatures, configurable signature blocks, and graphic-signature image management.
• Native support for Adobe Reader and Acrobat. CoSign allows seamless signing of PDF and PDF/A documents under Adobe versions 6/7/8/9/X, without the need for Adobe application plug-ins.
• Microsoft infrastructure. CoSign provides out-of-the-box integration with native Active Directory (AD, AD LDS); out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Windows Kerberos authentication; and support for various MS OS platforms, including 64bit OS. In addition, CoSign is 100% Microsoft .NET ready (both the solution and the SDK) and provides a management snap-in for MMC.