Digitally Sign an InfoPath form and Submit using Email In this video, I am going to show how you can take a Form such as the Form that I am looking at right now, the Resource Provisioning Form, Turn on Digital Signatures on the Form so the data in the Form can be signed, and then send this form through E mail to a few people who will return it back to me through E mail as well, and they will have the option to sign the Form or not sign the Form. Okay so Tools Form Options Digital Signatures, currently the Digital Signature for the Form is disabled, I am going to enable the Digital Signature for the entire Form, it is going to automatically Save the signature in Signatures 1 group and that is not changeable so that is what is going to be. Also I am going to click on Prompt user to sign the form if it is submitted without a signature, so it will prompt them, it will not be required, but it will be recommended that they sign the Form. So it is authentic and I know that the Form is coming from them. So I am going to check this box. And as soon as I check this box, a new one pops up for Submit Options, I need to configure the Submit for this. Alright Allow users to submit this form and let them submit it through E mail. Now I need to add a data connection for the E mail so Add. This window is asking me to give the person s E mail to whom the Form will be submitted to. Since I want all the Forms to be submitted to me, I am going to submit my E mail here. Okay, and if I want to Carbon Copy or Blank Carbon Copy, I can put those names here as well. And Subject I will make this field dynamic, so I will click on function, use the concatenation function here and let us do this Resource Provisioning Form for, and I will use User s First Name and let us put a string value after First Name, so First Name, quotation mark space quotation marks, and then the last field is going to be the Last Name (FirstName,, LastName).
So when the Form comes in, it is going to say the subject is going to be Resource Provisioning Form for, and then space First Name space Last Name (FirstName LastName). Great, now actually I am going to go ahead and copy this whole text because I am going to be suing this again. So I will put this on my clipboard click on Next and here is what I will use it again, so when the actual form comes in, it is going to be sent as an attachment, InfoPath attachment. And I want that attachment also to be named something, so I will just use the same name. Click on Function paste OK. It is a good option to click on the Attach the form template to ensure that the user can open the form and then click on Next. I will change the name of this connection to E mail Submit, so I can refer to it easily later Finish. Okay, also in Advanced Submit Options, I am going to change this value here after Submit to Close the form once it is submitted OK now click on OK here. Now I am going to go ahead and Publish this form template, so I am going to click on Publish Form Template and I get this dialog box for publishing. And I want to publish it to a list of E mail recipients, so I will leave that option checked click on Next. This is very important to make this a friendly name for the template, so I am just going to call this Resource Provisioning Form Next all the different fields which are going to be propagated with the form, I already have this configured so I am going to leave it at Next and Publish. So a new E mail window opens up and I can put the E mail of the people that I want to send this form to send it to Ben and Kyle and I will tell them Please fill the form, sign it, and submit back to me then I am going to go ahead and Send the form. Okay that should have been sent now. I will go ahead and sign in as Ben to see if he got it. I am going to use a RDP connection to sign in as Ben Open up the Outlook. Okay, so here is the form that was sent by me and received by Ben. I am going to go ahead and Open this form. Now Ben would not have been able to open this form unless he had InfoPath client on his machine, so the InfoPath client is a requirement for forms to be opened up that have been received through E mail. Ben is going to go ahead and try to fill this
out. Fill in all the parameters and then Submit the form. Okay so he is told that, you know, it is recommended that you sign this form first before you submit it. You can submit this without signing it if you click on No or if you click on Yes to sign this form. I will click on Yes, so the Digital Signatures window pops up here I am going to click on Add and say Yes I want to sign the entire form. Now I do not have a digital id at this time. It is telling me that you can get a digital id from a Microsoft partner. You can create your own digital id but that is going to be created from the InfoPath client. If you do that, it is only verified on this computer, and that does not really do you too much good. There are three choices One you can make the digital id on a InfoPath, You can get it from a Microsoft partner. It could be any sort of certificate authority. It could be VeriSign or something like that or A third choice is you can use a Certificate Service server that could be running in your corporative environment and have that issue a digital id for you. So I am going to do that. Let me cancel out of here and leave this window as it is, open up the browser, okay, what I wanted to go to actually is (08:00), my server name and Certificate Server, which is already running on this box. Okay, so I am going to request a certificate here, User Certificate, submit the request, it is telling me now that Fine everything is good. Do you want to request a certificate now? I will say Yes. Once I receive the certificate, it asks me If you want to install certificate, and of course I do Yes. Okay, that is now installed. That means if I come back to the InfoPath form click on Add for signature, now it is telling me It has found that I have a certificate. It is signing as Ben Burton. It is issued by CertServer. I can click on Change and see my certificate right here click on View Certificate and here is the certificate that I got from my certificate authority in my Certificate Server. Great, also I can click on the See the additional information above what you are signing link and that actually shows me the picture of the form the way it exists right now after I filled it
out, so this is exactly what I will be signing. Great I can put my comments here if I like and click on sign, so it has signed it now, it is a valid certificate I will click on Close and it is telling me that the form is going to go back to asif@awbikes.local, which is right Send great, it is submitted successfully. Now, it is telling me that Do you want to save the changes to this form in your inbox? I will say Yes. And then there is a feature called InfoPath forms folders that I can have it create for me in Outlook, so I can group all the forms together and see them together. So yes I want to say, Yes, create a Form Folder that is right. So here we go. In the Form Folder, I can see the fields have been propagated up from the form. And it is showing me the First Name, Last Name, Date, Date of Hire, Department, Phone, Computer and Manual, all different fields like that. Okay, I have no more use for Ben at this time so I am going to go ahead and close his session. Log off. And in my own inbox, so in Asif s inbox, I am going to click on Send/Receive and make sure that Ben s E mail has arrived and here it is. I will click on Open form, so this tells me that this form has been digitally signed and I could verify the validity of it by clicking on the Toolbar button that says it is signed, which is right here. I will click on OK. First thing to notice is that all these fields are Read Only. It has got this small little icon that is popping up. Everything is Read Only. I cannot change it because it has already been signed. I can view the digital signature and see that Ben Burton is the one who signed it. When I try to close this, it is going to ask me if I want to make a Form Folder, just like Ben did, I am going to do the same thing and it made the Form Folder for me. Since I am the one who is actually receiving all these forms, it is good for me to have a Form Folder where all the different forms will get collected that are returned by Kyle and Ben and other folks, and the information from that forms is propagated up into columns so then I can sort out things and see exactly who has submitted, what department they are in, what phone option do they need, whether it is a mobile device or cell phone, the computer option desktop or laptop, the manual which, in this one it shows HR positions manual even though this person is in Sales, but I am sure you get the idea. So let me go ahead and close this window.
And one last time also sign in as Kyle and have him submit the form. Okay, so Kyle has been signed in. Open up Outlook OK here is the form. Let us open the form and in the form, Kyle is going to fill in all the information Kyle Urlacher, Department is going to be IT, given a mobile device, laptop and an IT manual Submit. Once again it is asking me If you want to sign the form? I want to say Yes Sign the entire form, and Kyle already has a certificate, actually has a couple of certificates, I want to use one of them and Sign the form Close and Send. Great! Once again it is going to ask me to make a Form Folder. I will go ahead and do that and then I will log off from Kyle s session. So back in my session, I am going to click on Send/Receive. Here is Kyle s form. I will click on Open Form. It is telling me that this form has been signed. Great, everything looks good. If I Close this form, it is asking me to create a Form Folder, well I already have one, so it is just going to group it together since it is the same name, same name of the form. So as I showed in this video, using this features, you can make the form digitally signable submitted through E mail and have people submit it back to you through E mail as well and have it all collected into an InfoPath Form Folder, which appears in Outlook.