Electronic seals (e-seals) provide the same legal validity as a company rubber stamp on paper, where no individual signer authenticity is conveyed. The main difference between a seal and a signature is that a signature is meant for individuals (natural persons), whereas a seal is used by a legal entity (business or organization). E-seals can be applied by more than one person or system under the control or supervision of the legal entity.
The electronic sealing feature in Adobe Acrobat Sign allows organizations to apply e-seals using digital certificates issued to their legal entity to help convey the integrity and authenticity of invoices, statements, or other official documents. Seals can be placed using only a graphic, a text block containing the subject, reason, date, and time of the seal, or a combination of both the graphical seal and text.
Users are assigned specific privileges to automatically apply an e-seal for their organization to a document using a digital certificate obtained from a Trust Service Provider (TSP) with a Cloud Signature Consortium (CSC) API integration with OAuth 2.0 Client Credential authorization flow. The following providers currently support this feature:
Electronic seals are automatically available to Adobe Acrobat Sign enterprise tier accounts and can be configured at the account or group level.
Two settings must be configured to expose the e-seal options on the user's Send page.
At least one e-seal must be configured, active, and available to the group from which the agreement is being sent. Otherwise, the option to add the e-seal isn't exposed on the page.
Creating an e-seal requires that you first obtain a digital certificate from a TSP with a CSC API integration. (See the Prerequisites)
Once you have the certificate, you can configure the e-seal by:
1. Navigating to Account Settings > Electronic Seals.
2. Click the plus icon with a circle around it .
The interface to configure the new e-seal opens.
3. Enter the e-seal parameters using the information provided by your TSP:
4. Click Save when done.
The configured e-seal is created in Active status and displays on the Electronic Seals page in the list of seals.
The e-seal is ready to be applied to agreements immediately.
When the group, user, and e-seal are properly configured, the Add Electronic Seal link is exposed in the top menu bar of the Recipients stack.
Once the agreement is sent, the e-seal recipient may not be edited or delegated.
If the Add Electronic Seal link is not exposed, check that:
All agreements that use an e-seal recipient must go to the authoring environment to place the digital signature field that contains the e-seal.
All e-seals must be explicitly placed on the document using a digital signature field.
All other recipient roles can be authored normally.
The e-seal is applied immediately after the e-seal recipient becomes the active recipient in the signature cycle.
The e-seal is applied programmatically in the location of the digital signature field, and the next recipient is notified (if any).
Email notification of the signing event follows the same rules and format as other recipient emails.
The applied e-seal provides the signature reason (as defined in the seal configuration) and the time/date stamp of when the seal was applied.
The digital signature object that contains the e-seal is slightly larger in height than a standard e-signature field:
Agreements that include an e-seal recipient clearly identify the sealing process in the audit report.
Details captured include: