Digital Signing of Documents

Use

This function supports digital signing of documents in Records and Case Management (RMPS). This type of digital signature meets the requirements of the German signature law.

The signatories sign digitally at the front-end using their private key, which is saved on a chip card (smart card), in conjunction with the corresponding public key certificate. This function also supports the automatic verification of externally signed attachments that are imported into RMPS as incoming post items in e-mail. The server verifies the signature and certificate using an external security product that exchanges data via the SSF interface ( Secure Store and Forward) of the SAP system.

The following graphic illustrates the data transfer for digital signatures:

A digitally signed document in RMPS (such as an incoming post item with a digitally signed attachment) is forwarded to SAP Single Sign-On using the SSF interface.
The signed document is sent back to Records and Case Management and is then available for other activities (such as display, further signatures, verifications).

Figure: Digital Signature

Integration

The features for the digital signing of documents are available for Records and Case Management in conjunction with SAP Single Sign-On.

Prerequisites

For more information on the settings that have to be made in Records and Case Management and the SSF settings in the SAP system, see Configuration: Digital Signing of Documents..

Features

Signing and Verifying

You sign documents in a special SAP HTML Viewer Control. The document is converted to PDF format and is displayed as a PDF document in the HTML viewer.

The digital signature in RMPS supports multiple signing of a document.

The following activities are available in the dropdown menu of the RMPS application toolbar menu under Digital Signature and in SAP HTML Viewer Control:

Pushbutton
Sign	This calls SAP HTML Viewer Control for signing a document
Display Verification Result	Calls an overview of the last verification results of a document in the SAP HTML Viewer Control: verification was successful verification result is not yet available (this depends on the asynchronous background processing) verification was not successful
Display Signature History	Calls the signature activities of a document logged in chronological order.
SAP HTML Viewer Control
	Starts the verification of a digital signature manually.

Automatic Signature Check for Incoming Post Items

Digitally signed documents are verified automatically if they were imported into Records and Case Management as e-mail attachments in the form of incoming post items. You can call up the result for a document in SAP HTML Viewer Control under Display Verification Result.

The prerequisite for the automatic recognition and verification of digitally signed attachments is that the file name conforms to the naming convention <file name>.<original file type>.<signature file type>. The original file type (such as DOC, PDF, ...) describes in which file format the user data is saved in the PKCS#7 container. For signature file types, the SAP system distinguishes between signed attachments and unsigned attachments. The SAP system has to recognize the signature file type as a MIME type application/pkcs7-signature (see

Configuration Document).

More Information

For more information on the general SSF functions in the SAP system, see the Start of the navigation path SAP Help Portal under SAP NetWeaver Components Next navigation step SAP Web Application Server Security (BC-SEC) Secure Store & Forward / Digital Signatures (BC-SEC-SSF) Public Key Technology End of the navigation path .