By Nitin Borwankar
One of noticeable differences between working in a conventional office and a cafe is the complete absence of printing and faxing capabilities in the latter. Most of the time this is not an issue as we WebWorkers are primarily working on electronic content for execution (software), publishing (articles/docs) or communication (email/IM).
But, every so often arises, with irritating insistence, a need for printing something, signing it and faxing it back. At this point I have to either work out of home – and plug in that printer and fax machine for a bit, or going to FedEx Kinko’s or something similar locally. Every time I do that I find myself wanting a better way.
Here’s a WebOffice feature that I would like. When someone sends me a doc to sign – they should be willing to accept a digital version of my handwritten signature. Not a digital signature as in public key cryptography, but a scanned image of my physical signature, embedded in the document. I want technology to make this foolproof. I can password protect double triple encrypt the image on my laptop. But how do I prevent my embedded signature from being extracted and abused?
EchoSign, which recently won the best of show award at office 2.0 has a pretty good interim solution. Unfortunately, it doesn’t solve the bigger problem. EchoSign’s solution also requires docuemnt sender to agree to accept digitally signed docs – the law says they have to, but try having that conversation with the Insurance company, or the DMV, or the IRS. So it seems a bit of a non-starter for now. In Three years from now, hopefully things will happen this way. (How EchoSign Works?)
Maybe I am thinking of the wrong solution. But this problem, printing-signing-faxing, is a nagging drag on my web worker mobility. As I write this I am expecting a faxed doc from my car insurance, and need to sign and fax a couple of documents. No, doing business only with people who don’t use paper is not an option, yet.
So how do you address this paper problem in your own personal WebOffice world?
Nitin Borwankar if the official GigaOm Tech Gnome.
If you’re willing to pay a little bit for the convenience, there are a number of fax-to-email-and-back services. I think best in breed is http://www.efax.com
Overlay your signature image on top of the fax document you receive, and send it back. The people at the other end have no idea that you did it all electronically.
-Ben
When I have to fax back a document with my signature on it, I’ll often just paste my scanned signature onto the document and fax it. Usually the quality on a faxed document is so poor, the receiver cannot tell if I physically signed it or just pasted an image of my signature onto it. I guess it really comes down to your intent. Do you stand by your signature whether you just pasted an image of your signature on the dotted line or actually signed on the dotten line?
Now the other question is how do you prevent someone from abusing your signature… that’s a whole other bag of worms.
I’ve found the same issue at home. I don’t have a standard telephone system so I usually have to leave home and goto a friends home or to a business. I’ve used efax and it does work. The only thing is it applies your fax as an attachment, but they offer good rates and it does work. I’ve used it several times for sending estimates and invoices.
We use trustfax (www.trustfax.com). They have $19.95 a year plan with 70 free fax. When I joined they had $9.95 a year with 10 cents per page plan. You get a toll free number too. I find it very convenient. Trustfax is a Comodo product. So you can trust them too.
I forgot to add. You don’t need to download any software like efax. Everything is web based and you can use doc, pdf or jpeg.
webworker is convenient than paper!
[...] A very good point brought up by Om. Don’t you hate companies and businesses that still require paperwork? What’s the point? To say “Oh, but YOU signed this document, we have you by the ….. !!!” Seriously, though it appears that there is this new company called Echosign that won best of show at the Office 2.0. They are trying to change the face of electronic signatures. Read all about it in Web Worker Daily’s article by Om. [...]
Thanks for the great piece on EchoSign.
One important note: we DO in fact solve the “bigger problem:, i.e. “printing-signing-faxing”. In fact, the majority of EchoSigners totally automate the pain around faxing back contracts by selecting “Written Signature” on EchoSign instead of “Electronic Signature”!
Brooks-Eckerd, Cisco, Network General, AtRoad and hundreds of others companies use us to automate getting contracts and documents automatically signed and faxed back to all parties (not just recipient like eFax), tracked, PDF’d, and filed using EchoSign.
See here for a quick demo:
http://www.echosign.com/public/static/howItWorks01.jsp
And you can try it in about 60 seconds here:
http://www.echosign.com/tryit
Thanks again,
Jason Lemkin, ceo
Wow, that seems to have struck a nerve!
As far as efax like services, they are fine for docs that are faxed to me, but most of the times these days I’ll get a PDF or MSWord doc which I have to print out and sign and fax back. I do know how to paste a signature into these docs but I won’t do it until there’s a way to prevent my signature from getting hijacked.
As far as EchoSign is concerned, aside from the early-ness of it I have a fundamental issue with infrastructure technology (email, IM, voice, web …) being based on proprietary standards. Paper and pen are open standards – so are email attachments and jpg files.
EchoSign requires both parties to be signed up for the service prior to the document exchange. This model is like the “compuserve” model in email – you can’t really use it unless everyone you know is using it. So what happened back in the early 90′s when an old classmate of mine sent me their email address on a competing service – islands of information.
In the EchoSign model what happens when two large companies need to do business but are signed up with competing signature service providers? There will be more than one provider, eventually.
When EchoSign can figure out a way to make their service an IETF open standard and/or a W3C open standard – they’ll make bazillions. Until then they will be a great solution for large companies that can insist that their smaller partners use EchoSign. But for now, unless I can force everyone of my clients to use EchoSign, it is not a solution for this WebWorker. Not yet, maybe some day …..
Good Luck with all your WebWork!
I second benwalther’s suggestion. As for Nitin saying:
I’d argue that I could easily forge and fax your document using a traditional fax machine and that’s totally acceptable as legal and just as prone to falseification as the digital solution. How does the manual method solve that (without mailing)?
Here’s a tip: if you’re a Mac user, I’d recommend that you check out this page that offers sending two free faxes. Of course this only works on a PC, so when I complained to their tech support (look for Live Chat), they offered me a free month and a subsequent ongoing discount on my Pro account. YMMV, but I felt like this was a good deal.
As for faxing signed docs, I use Adobe Acrobat’s stamp tool with a vectorized (previously scanned) version of my signature — and then eFax to send the generated PDF. If you’re concerned about security and have the full version of Acrobat, you can at least encrypt the PDF so that no other changes can be made to the document without a password.
At least that’s what works for me in leiu of a genuine article phsyical fax machine.