About electronic signatures

The FDA Module provides electronic signature functionality. An electronic signature is an electronic indication that a person adopts the contents of an electronic message. For comparison, a digital signature is a digitized image of a person's handwritten signature. The FDA Module produces an electronic signature by authenticating the identity of the person signing the document.

When an electronic signature is required, users are shown a dialog that prompts them to type their credentials. The user must type the same Windows account name and password as the account currently logged on to Windows. Authentication only succeeds if the credentials match.

If the user is successfully authenticated, then the electronic signature information is stored in the document metadata. Both successful and unsuccessful electronic signature attempts are recorded in the audit log. Electronic signature information can be manifested on the signed document's rendition or on an attached signature page using BlueCielo Publisher as described in the BlueCielo Publisher Administrator's Guide.

Electronic signatures can be required by and are configured in the transitions of the workflow applied to each document type. Documents must proceed through a workflow to be electronically signed. The persons authorized to run a transition are the persons who will be prompted to sign the documents. If a user executes a workflow transition that requires electronic signature for a batch of documents, their user's name can be remembered from their authentication to open the vault as described in Configuring authentication.

Note    Enabling electronic signatures for a document type makes properly configuring the document type more important than ever because the signatures can be legally binding. Therefore, we recommend that you review the configuration of the vault's document types before enabling electronic signatures. If a document type is configured to use document type workflow, any user with access to that document type will be able to sign the document during the selected transitions. If a document type is configured to use workflow definitions instead, any user who satisfies the authorization options that are configured for a transition will be able to sign the document during that transition. Your review might require reconfiguration of the document types or the creation of additional workflow definitions in order to restrict the ability to create electronic signatures to only the users that are authorized to do so.

Configuring electronic signatures and signature pages are described in the following topics.