Digitally signing output

You can digitally sign generated Microsoft Word or PDF documents using a digital certificate that is available on the file system. Digital signatures enable confident sharing of documents from trusted sources. For example you can protect a document from unauthorized changes.

Before you begin

The certificate must meet the following conditions:
Note: Here is a example command that you can use to generate a sample certificate:
<JRE_HOME>\keytool -genkeypair -alias <alias_name> -keyalg RSA -keypass <private key password> keystore <path to store the keystore c:\temp\keystore.pfx> -storepass <keystore password> keysize <key size 2048> -storetype pkcs12

About this task

You can digitally sign generated Microsoft Word or PDF documents using a digital certificate. If you have multipart documents, digitally signing output is ignored.

Procedure

  1. Set preferences for generating documents from digitally signed templates.
  2. In Launcher, click Window > Preferences > RPE > Document Execution > Digital Signature.
  3. Provide digital signature details for signing the generated output documents:
    1. Path to certificate: The location of the certificate that Rational® Publishing Engine looks in to verify a digitally signed document.
    2. Private key password for the certificate: The password to read the certificate.
    3. Comments: The reason for signing the document (for example, agreement with the terms in this document).
    4. Location of the signature: The signing location (for example, the country, city, institution, company, organization where the document was digitally signed).
  4. Click Apply and OK.
  5. For remote document generation, you must enable flags in the remote server where the document generation is running.
  6. In Launcher, generate the document.

Results

If you trust the certificate in the generated document, you can add the certificate to the trusted list in Adobe Reader and in Microsoft Word. Any documents signed using this trusted certificate open in Adobe Reader and in Microsoft Word as digitally signed documents with a valid signature.
Note: Document generation might fail when the signed referenced template is added with an absolute path. To work around this problem, put the reference template in the same location as the main template and add the reference template with a relative path instead of an absolute path.

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