Unanswered

Self Sign and Inline Edit PDF documents from SPO integrated document within D365

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Shalabh Gupta

Hi All,

We are looking for ways/ideas to inline-edit and self-sign/fill a SharePoint Online Integrated .pdf document opened from Dynamics 365?

We have tried using Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Document Cloud and DocuSign and none of them let us self sign and in-line edit a .pdf document. Their use-case is driven around contract/agreement management where user1->request signature from user 2-> so on and so forth post which the signed/edited document gets stored in a separate folder under SPO document library and does not let user 2 edit changes made from user1.

Our use case is as follows:

We do not want to request signatures from other user. We want the user to open the document and self sign it. (digital/image signatures are acceptable)
Document gets locked after first sign, and user 2 cannot edit user1 changes. This is something we don't want.
- We want the document to be editable all the time.

Categories:

Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

I have the same question (0)

All responses (2)

Answers (0)

cchannon 4,702 Moderator on at

Like (2)

Report

Yeah, this is a tough problem. I, too, have a lot of customers with pdf signing needs and I can tell you right now there is no perfect answer, but there are some approaches that can make it better.

1. Your second requirement is the most important piece here. If you want the document to stay editable than what you're looking for is "e-signature" not "digital signature". The distinction here is that "e-signature" just refers to putting a squiggle on the page, whereas "digital signature" refers to encoding a certificate from a trusted authority to lock the document. Because you don't want to lock, you don't want digital signature. That makes things easier.

2. e-signatures are nothing fancy at all; just an image layered on top of the pdf. So really you could make that edit with any pdf editor you like, including plain old free Adobe Acrobat desktop. The way to make this easy for users is to change the browser settings in the browser of their choice to by default download PDFs instead of opening them. This will prevent the browser from popping the pdf in a normal (chromium?) interface which doesn't have a Sign button. Instead, once it is downloaded, the user can open it with Acrobat, hit the Sign button, drop a squiggle on the page, save it, and upload it back to SharePoint.

Now the downside: this process works, but it is a bit clunky; you need to download, open in acrobat, save locally, then upload back to SharePoint, which may or may not overwrite the old file depending on the naming and your versioning rules... anyway, I find that this works, but users don't love it. In our implementations we've added our own Acrobat plugin that saves directly back to the SharePoint location where the document was downloaded from, but I wouldn't advise you to try the same (acrobat plugins are NOT easy to make).

Beyond that, there are client libraries for working with PDFs if you want to custom build your own control, but it will not be a small effort; something like that is on my wishlist but I haven't yet found the customer that wants to pay for it.

Good luck!

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Shalabh Gupta 80 on at

Like (0)

Report

Hi @cchannon Thank you so much for your detailed reply.

We can use e-signature, but one of the requirements in the use case we have is to upload the image as a signature when the document is signed on behalf of someone else, in which case e-sign approach would not work for us.

Regarding downloading the file, updating and then uploading it back to SPO, we are currently following this approach but this is something we want to move away from for ease of access on the document navigation portion within our tool.

We would be curious to see what resources you have used to write an "Adobe Acrobat Plugin" or ways in which we can write a custom control you were talking about. If you could help us with some of those documentations/samples or any sort of help which can help us move forward, it would be awesome.

Thanks again and looking forward for your reply.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No