Digital signatures have answered the need for authentication and security in today’s competitive environment. As the ‘online’ visibility of businesses has increased in recent years, they need solutions to ‘secure and authenticate’ their visibility through a mechanism like digital signature. The technology upgrade has made it possible for businesses to sign various file formats, saving money, paper, and time. Of late, signing PDF documents have emerged as one of the popular concepts in the overall digital signatures’ galore. The PDF document signing is often needed while sending medical records, public announcements, or invoices. While authenticating the whole process, this PDF signing ensures confidentiality and security too.

Today, the market is flooded with digital signature solutions, which allow PDF signing and encrypting in Adobe-compatible format, eliminating the necessity for Adobe Acrobat. This has helped businesses; especially service sector companies streamline their monthly financial cycles with ease and security. Nowadays, government agencies are also going ‘tech-savvy’, allowing them to add efficiency and speed to their traditional tedious processes.

PDF has its own format of signing and verification. Many digital signature solutions providers are offering solutions that are compatible with this PDF format, allowing users to verify their signatures with the help of Adobe Reader. E-Lock is one such provider, who is offering Advanced PDF signing solutions to the global market. From desktop solution to web-based solution, E-Lock offers solutions that are compatible with worldwide legislations on digital signature. With E-Lock’s ‘Remote Signing’ technology clients can directly sign PDF files stored on the server without downloading them on the client PC.

Besides its commercial utility, the PDF signing is also used for internal official communications. In today’s era of stiff competition, businesses need tools, which can help them serve their large customer’s base in convenient and faster way. Now, businesses need solutions that can bulk sign various documents in lesser time without human intervention and errors. And solution providers are also answering their needs with ‘accurate’ and ‘exact’ solutions, such as E-Lock Bulk Signer.

If we can say, it is very typical of human nature to follow the principle of ‘seeing is believing’, and PDF signing solutions do exactly the same, as user’s signature is visible in the document. This adds sense of trust and confidence amongst users, and helps them make entire process trust worthy and secure.

The PDF signing solutions offer a lot of ‘signing freedom’ to the signer, as he/she can select the placement of the signature in the document. Besides, the signer can display scanned handwritten signature or a logo inside the digital signature block in the PDF.

It would be unfair to come to an end of this article without mentioning some other benefits offered by PDF signing solutions. They are:

·The signer can incorporate the reason for signing, time of signing, and location. The signing time can be taken from the local machine clock, or can use third party time stamp server.

·The signer can sign the documents with the help of certificates, which are stored in a variety of locations. It can directly sign through the browser, such as IE or Netscape family of browsers; PFX / P12 files, smart cards, or hardware tokens.

·The signed PDF documents do not need any specific verification software. The verification can be done using free Adobe reader.

·The PDF files can be encrypted using password of users choice for maintaining confidentiality. As with signed files, the encrypted files do not require any third party software for decryption. When the file is opened in Adobe Reader, the user is prompted for the password. The file can be opened only if the correct password is supplied.

Therefore along with authenticity, the PDF signing offers security and confidentiality of signed documents. From individual document signing to bulk signing, PDF digital signature solutions will have much more utility as time passes.