We’re pleased to announce that Ascertia has been ‘Highly Commended’ at this year’s UK IT Industry Awards in the Cloud Innovation Provider of the Year category!

Companies trading within the EU must comply with countless regulations every day, including directives specifically relating to VAT and electronic invoicing.

Launched in 2012, the G-Cloud framework has revolutionised how public sector departments access innovative IT solutions. By providing the UK Government the ability to procure services from approved cloud-based suppliers, IT costs have been driven down and efficiency increased. 

This article discusses the features that should be on a highly desirable feature list when looking for an OCSP Responder product. Although the main focus of this topic is technical there are of course also commercial aspects that need consideration, these are summarised briefly at the end. The technical features explained here are all available and implemented in Ascertia ADSS OCSP Server, which is downloadable on trial basis.

It is clear that digital signatures are a very valuable security technique that enables data integrity (proving that the information has not changed since signing) and user authentication (proving who signed-off or approved the information). Digital signatures are now widely used in various industries and applications from signing of machine-readable travel documents to payment transactions to e-invoicing.

The ADSS Connector for SharePoint has always provided tight integration with the Microsoft SharePoint portal and ADSS Server Go>Sign Service. This allows enterprise users to "click and sign" on a document in SharePoint. The internal process first uploads the target document to ADSS Server, (converting the document to PDF/A if required) and then shows it to the user using the ADSS Go>Sign Viewer.

The ADSS Server Signing Service can create PDF digital signatures or all common ETSI PAdES formats (PAdES Part 2,3,4) and it can also create and apply visible signature appearances where requested. While other digital signature approaches have quite limited signature appearance functionality, the ADSS Server Signing Service includes a sophisticated and yet easy to use signature appearance designer. This enables administrators to create visible signatures that are optimised for their business purpose.

ADSS Server v4.8+ supports clever integration with Active Directory and other LDAP compliant directories to enable seamless and automatic management of each user’s digital certificate, including generation, revocation and re-issuance.