ID-Sign for MS Office 2.8.6

User reviews

• 15 out of 15 people found this review helpful

  4 stars

  Version: ID-Sign for MS Office 2.8.6

  "Great software, easy to use!"

  by natalie_petrokovski on February 5, 2007

  Pros: Click through 3 buttons in the installation process, start up Word or Excel, and you are ready to sign your documents digitally. It's as easy as that.

  Really great software, very easy to use. It works seamlessly in our office environment. If you have Active Directory, set up so that everyone in the office can apply for a digital certificate, and you are ready for a paperless office. (Note: take a look at the company's web site, idsignet.com, which has an article on that topic)

  I really recommend it.

  Cons: If you don't know what a digital certificate is, it may be a bit confusing for you. After the installation, as you are ready to sign your document, it just shows that it can't find a signature certificate.

  It would be great if ID-Sign provide a tool to generate a self-signed certificate for users who don't have one. Granted, that's not what you want to use in serious document, but it would allow new users to start.

  But that's a nice-to-have feature, not necessary though.

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• 15 out of 15 people found this review helpful

  5 stars

  Version: ID-Sign for MS Office 2.8.6

  "ID-Sign is the way digital signature software should be!"

  by antoine_in_mtrl on February 3, 2007

  Pros: I'm not a security guru, but I have background in cryptography and security-related work experiences. I found the software here, downloaded it just for testing out.

  What I found really impressed me. ID-Sign's designers takes the context of digital signature applications into consideration, and tried to make the act of signing as simple as you can get. What is amazing is that they actually succeeded.

  The software is small in footprint, but is packed with really nice features. Other softwares require users to perform complicated steps to sign and verify a signature, ID-Sign made all it automated. And I have to say, they got it right too. ID-Sign takes multiple steps (all automated, of course) to verify a signature, including verifying the validity of the signature certificate, etc, then presents to the user a very-easy-to-understand conclusion (with notes, if you want to know the details).

  This is how a signature software should be. I've seen in the past, softwares that required users to jump through hoops to do the work.

  A 5-star recommendation!

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• 12 out of 12 people found this review helpful

  4 stars

  Version: ID-Sign for MS Office 2.8.6

  "Excellent digital signature software!"

  by alpha_geek2000 on April 15, 2007

  Pros: This is an excellent software, it does exactly what it is supposed to do, and exactly what I am looking for.

  It fits our business process really well. Actually, this idea of locked fields, as defined in ID-Sign, should allow it to fit any approval process in any real business environment. It is really flexible, and you can do anything you want with it in your approval process.

  Other reviewers already described of how they use the software for, so you get the idea.

  Signature verification is automated, thorough, detailed, and very nicely done too.

  I'd recommend it.

  Cons: The version (v2.8.6) available here has a small bug. It might not work very well with some certificate authority servers when you try to download CRL file. It works with most CA servers, but does not work with some.

  You can get a newer version (v2.8.8) from IDSignet web site (idsignet.com), which fixed the problem. The company releases updates quite often, so I'd suggest everyone to check it at their site from time to time.

  The user's manual is a bit outdated though. However, it should cover almost everything you need to know.

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• 10 out of 10 people found this review helpful

  4 stars

  Version: ID-Sign for MS Office 2.8.6

  "Nice locked fields"

  by coderking on April 5, 2007

  Pros: The best thing about ID-Sign is the locked fields. With that, you can basically indicate what you want to sign in a document.

  A locked field can be a single character, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, an image, a table, a cell in a table, multiple cells in the table, an embedded spreadsheet, an embedded Word document, a chart, a graph, the whole document, another ID-Sign signature, .... well, basically, anything in the document.

  The interesting thing is, once you understand that, you can use ID-Sign in any document in a business environment. No matter how many persons need to sign in the document, no matter what the document structure is, ID-Sign just works the way your business process works. You don't need to customize your process to fit it, it just fits your process.

  This is not all, ID-Sign makes using digital signature so simple. Other reviewers had already mentioned about automated validation, automatic recognition of USB tokens, etc, so I won't repeat here. They are make ID-Sign great.

  I installed it on Office 2007, and it just works. Good stuff.

  I tried out some other signature softwares too, but they make Office crawl like a snail. ID-Sign feels like a fresh air, you don't see any Office performance hit when using it, except a little bit at startup.

  Cons: Nothing negative that I can think of, except that it makes starting up Word half a second slower. But that's the way Office handles plugin anyway.

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• 9 out of 9 people found this review helpful

  5 stars

  Version: ID-Sign for MS Office 2.8.6

  "Our headache solved!"

  by tzendros on March 6, 2007

  Pros: I read natalie_petrokovski's updated review the other day, and found her situation amazingly similar to ours. We have 5 offices across the country, all connected to the same online approval system. The nasty thing is, everytime we need to sign a document in the approval process (and we do this many times a day, per our business requirements), we had to print it out. If it is a cross-department approval process, we had to fedex the thing across the country. In order to keep the signed documents in a central place (for auditing mainly), all signed documents must be shipped back to HQ as their final destination. It is messy, as people don't always do that. Sometimes, we lost the document before the approval process is finished, unbelievable. We were wondering what the online approval and collaboration system was for, because we did everything through snail mail, fax, and fedex anyway.

  Then I saw natalie_petrokovski's updated review, and decided to download ID-Sign for some trial.

  I have to say, we had been using for 2 days only, and between only two departments. So far so good, it works like a charm. With ID-Sign, the online approval and collaboration is doing what it is really built for, for this first time.

  Now, we just sign the document with ID-Sign, check it in to the approval system, the document is routed to the right person. The person checks out, approves/denies it, check it back in, it get routed to the next stop. Everyone can follow where the document is, what its status, who has signed it and who has not, etc, etc. And all these are done in real time, no more waiting for the fedex guy to pick up the package, and check if the package has arrived the next day, and try to track it down if it's not... No more running around like a headless chicken. Really cool. Now, this is what I call a real online collaboration and approval process. ID-Sign just filled the missing gap, which was the biggest headache in our business.

  If your situation is like ours, I'd say, give ID-Sign a try.

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