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Signing with a digital signature is like…

I had a good time at the European SharePoint conference in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago and hope that you all have a chance to visit there someday. The tapas and ambiance at Quimet y Quimet were great!

But back to digital signatures… I was asked to give a six minute presentation on digital signatures and SharePoint at the conference. My theme? That digital signatures will be your most successful SharePoint project. Why? For all of the hard benefits that I’ve discussed in my previous columns. But also for the soft benefits of bringing something new, fun, and very useful to your colleagues.

My new simile for digital signatures: they’re as productive and fun to use as faxing from your desktop. (But easier to install.) Remember the old way to fax? You’d compose your fax on your PC, then print it out, then walk over to your fax machine and feed your original in. You’d spend additional time dialing the number and waiting for the fax to go through.  

Remember how great it was when you first switched to desktop faxing? Just “print” to the fax machine, enter the recipient’s phone number and you’re done! No more standing over the fax machine while it folded, spindled, and mutilated your pages. And as an added bonus, faxes sent from the desktop are much clearer for the recipient.

In the same way, digital signatures improve the work life of everyone who uses them. You’ll get positive comments and your project will be successful. Plus the other benefits of digitally transforming your business processes to be fully online.

I chose the picture the boy riding his bicycle because he’s both going fast and clearly having a good time while doing so. Try it yourself: ask a digital signatures vendor for a free trial of SharePoint with digital signatures.

Image credit: Patrick Goossens