Remote Digital Signature Capture - Paperless
Large organizations such as YMCA of the North involve much paperwork with its members, customers, and employees. Luckily, modern technologies allow to consolidate and automate the agreements signing process avoiding using tons of paper. Digital Signature Capture application is designed to be functioning inside the YMCA of the North facilities network only, and does its work pretty well, but during the quarantine restrictions, the remote activities are considered as preferable and it was allowed for YMCA customers to provide their signatures online.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The Remote Digital Signature Capture application allows customers of the YMCA of the North to sign their agreements remotely and securely by receiving the request in their email inbox and providing the signature with a simple user experience. This also helps to eliminate personal contact in response to COVID-19 safety guidelines.
As the powerful content management system with the latest customization abilities for the content entities, Drupal 9 has been chosen to run the request procedure and ensure the security of the transferred data. The main Digital Signature Capture service is running internally on Drupal, which makes it easier to integrate the Remote signage website running on Drupal as well.
In the strict quarantine rules, the members of the YMCA of the North couldn't visit the YMCA locations and hence provide their signatures in the customer agreements on the devices connected to the internal network. In order to comply with the social distancing rules, it was requested to develop a secure web application for YMCA members to sign their customer agreements at home on their own devices.
The main requirements for the remote application were:
- It should be a lightweight and secure web application that mimics the internal Digital Signature Capture application
- It should be securely integrated with the internal service
- It should not store any customer information
The user stories created by the team were adapted for the Drupal 9 admin interface to provide a variety of options to modify the email template with the signature request, the look of the application, and wording. To comply with the security requirements, the application holds the signature request data until the documents are signed and the signature is receivec from the customer, then all the signature data is cleared once transferred to the internal storage. The signature request has timeout and can be opened just once.
Results:
Now the YMCA of the North can continue its legal operations by collecting customer signatures remotely and securely, the members of the YMCA of the North can continue their activities at the YMCA without the need to sign the documents at the location on the corporate devices, now they can do it at home on their own device, which is crucial in the strict requirements of COVID-19 quarantine.
The security principles, that were implemented within this project, are now considered by the team during the development and infrastructure set up so that the services provided and data transfer are safe for the customers and the corporation.
The Remote Digital Signature Capture application can be designed and adapted for any kind of business that involves signir the legal documents by the customers or employees. The Digital Signature Capture itself provides a paperless environment for the organization and the Remote Digital Signature Capture application provides an even better and secure experience fo the customers and organization.