Looking for solution to be able to allow our CRM users to sign online documents on our site , is there opensource solution for this ?
basically we will be signing the documents on behalf of the customer for the supplier but of course customer himself will be signing online, so here we will use one certificate to sign for different customers... timestamp and other features required to be the legal,
and if there is open source solution or one of small cost product would cover Annex1 and Annex2 all the required points
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file49952.pdf
we found this but would this work on Linux servers http://www.signfiles.com/digital-certificates/ and ItextPDF but would any of this be ok for legal side of things ?
Thnx
You might want to check out a service like DocuSign which already has integrations with major CRMs. Your main issue here is proving that it actually happened and that it's legally binding. The best way to do this is not to have an open source solution that you control, but to rely on a trusted 3rd party.
Full disclosure: I work for DocuSign.
Related
After initial browsing in Google, I couldn't work out the scope of DocuSign API.
I would like to know if it's feasible to implement these features
Multiple templates with custom form fields
Assign workflow to templates - multi-user e-signing by stages?
automate e-signing internally
User management/privileges - to create new document, recall/cancel, etc
Manage List of recipients - type association
Reporting such as; number of documents signed in the last month,
Please briefly explain what is DocuSign capable of and what needs to be developed differently
Thanks in advance
The general answer to your question is "yes." The DocuSign website, Developer Center, and Signature API reference documentation can help you understand the DocuSign Signature product and APIs.
If you have additional questions, you can talk with DocuSign staff, or try it for yourself. The Developer center enables you to create a free developer sandbox.
For API issues, you can also ask questions here on StackOverflow. Note that your questions should be much more specific than the questions you listed above. You also should show what you have already tried and what is not working for you.
Let's assume that you've created a SharePoint solution - a WebPart, a feature for a List Template, whatever - that you are planning to sell as a product.
How would you go about handling licensing of your solution?
I'm looking for some input in at least the following areas:
Code-wise:
1.1. Where do you keep the license itself? as a file somewhere? (then what happens in farms?) as a property in the property bag of the farm?
1.2. Do you implement "home-calling" - where your solution validate the license every now and then against your company's servers?
1.3. Any other best practice in this area will be welcome...
Business wise: How do you license - per user? per server? per instance (in case of WebParts or List Templates)?
Thanks.
I could tell you what we do:
We have a separate farm solution that handles trial/registration support for all our products
The license is eventually stored in the farm property bag (you have to support multiple servers)
We have a page to enter license key under the central admin solution's page
We license by front-end, you can know the number of front-end in the farm in code.
All products have a product name and the license key is a one-way encryption containing the product name. the trial support solution handles key validation.
1.1 You have to put in in the documentation and in the distribution files.
1.2 I would not do that for a sharepoint web part.
1.3 Invest in layout, documentation, support... Not just in the product itself.
Nobody will be able to answer that without knowing detailed information about your product, your market, your competitors, the alternatives, etc. Consider this book if you are serious about pricing.
We're planning to use Sharepoint 2010 as a CMS for a website we're building. This site will also have login functionality; and my boss suggested we use Sharepoint's user profile features to store user info (username, password, contact info, etc.) for the site. How is this better then say using a standard list or a database table somewhere? I'm looking into how this could possibly work; but has anyone here tried something similar? Any anecdotes about it you could share? Any constructive input is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Frank
You asked for anecdotes. I have an anecdote.
A while back, I was trying to set up a Sharepoint server that exposed users' personal pages to the Internet at large. We wanted to allow authenticated access, but not to require it; that is to say, normal users would have read-only access and additionally the ability to submit InfoPath form data to Sharepoint libraries created to receive the results. The users could thus post public information and create public surveys using Infopath web forms.
When I went to make access public, I ran into a few problems. The "unauthenticated users" option on the preferences page of the document library was greyed out, even when I was logged in with a super-admin account.
In the end, I had to do a little bit of URL hacking to make this work. I had to change "DOC" to "DOCLIST" in the URL I used to access the preferences page (not that exactly, but something like that) and then the "everyone" option became available. In other words, there was actually no official way to do what I was trying to do.
The whole thing left a really sour taste in my mouth about Sharepoint for Internet-facing sites. See also things like this. Sharepoint is really designed for Intranet use only. As an additional downside, it is much more resource-hungry than normal CMSen. A full Sharepoint install can, without a single user, choke a pretty powerful virtual machine. I can't comment on its scalability as I've never done a really large rollout, but I can say that the indexing service is pretty heavy on the CPU.
Seems to me that LDAP would be a better way to store information on users; if you're using Sharepoint, you've probably already got an AD infrastructure. AD stores user profile info in LDAP anyhow - what you see in "Active Directory Users and Computers" is just a glorified LDAP browser.
Here is my initial toughts:
PRO: It's "easy" to merge infomation from outer sources like your AD, to be stored with the "other" user information in order to be displayed using the same means.
CON: I haven't come across a FBA Membership provider for User Profile Store.
Is it possible to create a certificate for an Excel workbook which has some VBA macros, and distribute the certificates to a small group of users?
Remou's answer is spot on, but be aware though that, dependent on the user's security settings, self-certified projects might only replace the standard macro security warning with another about self-signed projects - not exactly a win in my book as it can confuse already wary users.
In a small group this may not be an issue, but then neither should asking them to click 'Enable' to the standard dialog...
The only way to completely get round this is to purchase a full-fat signing certificate - $$$
This may be of interest: Self Certify projects
I work for a large organization and we have been utilizing SharePoint for document library. Yesterday my boss called me to his office and asked me:
"I heard that SharePoint is an ECM! So what can it do for us?".
"What kind of problem do you want us to solve utilizing SharePoint?", I replied.
"I want to know what it means when they say it is a ECM and how it can help us?", He said.
I told him it has Document Management, WorkFlow, Records Management, Search and some other stuff.
Anywho, He wants me to put togetter a list of things that SharePoint offers as an ECM.
You might find some useful info on the MS ECM team's blog.
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server has a substantial content management system available. What was previously Microsoft Content Management Server was discontinued and that functionality was put under the Sharepoint umbrella. Usually this is referring to web content, but it can honestly be any kind of content relevant to an enterprise. It is intended to be a direct competitor to all the major WCMS out there, focused especially on the enterprise (governance, auditing, security model, etc).
That having been said, the current iteration of MOSS's EWCM pretty much blows. If you can develop your CM strategy to be parallel to MOSS, it can work out OK, otherwise it's much more pain than it's worth. Use SP for document management and use something else for content management.
Sharepoint is a collaboration platform restricted to a windows environment
Give Alfresco communities (labs) a go is my opinion here as it 'acts' as a Sharepoint server so Microsoft Office suite will not notice the difference but your wallet will...
Er... think the boss got a bit too much $$$ to spend. But really, an't we supposed to deploy a technical solution to solve a business problem.
The list of features can be found at
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/product/capabilities/Pages/default.aspx