Document Management News

A new European standard for accepting electronic documents has been published by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)

The multi-part standard will support secure paperless business transactions throughout Europe in compliance with European legislation.

The standard defines a series of profiles for PAdES - Advanced Electronic Signatures for Portable Document Format ( PDF) documents.

The ETSI standard supports the European Commission's "Action Plan on eSignatures and eIdentification". This seeks to improve the efficiency of cross-border use of electronic signatures. The ETSI open standard means a document created and signed in one member state can be validated in another.

The standard also supports long term use of digitally-signed documents, whether they are continually used or archived. The standard supports Long-Term Validation (LTV) requirements, meaning it is possible to validate the document to confirm that the signature was valid at the time it was signed.

PAdES is complementary to two other ETSI electronic signature standards that do not involve human-readable documents - Cryptographic Message Syntax Advanced Electronic Signatures (CAdES) and XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (XAdES).

The PAdES, CAdES and XAdES standards can be downloaded free of charge from the ETSI website