Electronic Signatures Digital Annotation in PDF Documents with OpenAnnotate

TSG has just completed another enhancement to OpenAnnotate to allow for users to electronically sign documents using their finger or mouse to put their “wet signature” on a document as a digital annotation. This post will outline TSG’s methodology for performing electronic signatures in a variety of different ways.

We typically see two types of requests from clients doing electronic signatures within their ECM repository. In the controlled document realm typically all of the reviewers and approvers of the document are registered users in the system (they have a username/password). In these cases we will leverage our ActiveWizard form solution that allows for dynamic form/workflow to trigger an approval workflow based on the form answers.

The second type of approval is one in which the approvers of the form are not registered in the system, and are typically outside vendors or consumers signing a simple form. Some of our clients have leveraged external signing tools such as DocuSign to accomplish these types of approvals. Be sure to check out our contract management solution to see what our DocuSign integration looks like.

Our new streamlined way to accomplish electronic signatures is our new ‘Signature Mode’ for OpenAnnotate, which allows for simple one tap signatures for users on a desktop or iPad. A typical use case we see in healthcare is a patient electronically filling out a form. In the demo video below, we are filling out a “Patient Assessment Form” on an iPad during a home care visit. After completing the form, the user is required to sign the document. By leveraging OpenAnnotate in signature mode, we are able to quickly gather the user’s “finger signature”, and place it on the electronic form in the repository. The signature is audited on the document with the date/time that the patient signed the document. These types of signatures can be used on any PDFs that are stored in your Documentum, Alfresco, or Hadoop repository.

Click below for more information about OpenAnnotate or to try our online demo: