Interview with Carsten Heiermann, Chief Evangelist of Foxit Corporation, about PDF Days Online 2021

PDF Association: At the PDF Days Online 2021, you will be hosting a presentation titled “How to make e-Signing interoperable” – what’s that about?

Carsten Heiermann: Today you basically have two options: Either use digital signing with certificates and a certain level of complexity. This is interoperable, but for many people and use cases, just too difficult to handle. No wonder, we all receive requests for documents to sign, based on the cloud eSigning services, like Foxit also has one with FoxitSign? Of course, the sender of the document locks all participants in to a specific vendor. And, most information on the audit trail is stored in the vendors cloud. The document will not be signed by each participant, but only “notarized” by the cloud provider. Wouldn’t it be great to have the ease of use of the cloud signing, together with the vendor independence and the openness of the digital signatures? I’ll propose a solution for that, a “document based” signing alternative, using the to be signed PDF as the place to store the audit trail information.

PDF Association: Who is your presentation aimed at?

Carsten Heiermann: If you’re using eSigning services, you might want to join. Of course, this is an early stage proposal and might need some work in the standardization community as well, thus join, when you’re having an interest in that area as well!

PDF Association: What will the people who attend your presentation be able to take away from it?

Carsten Heiermann: A great idea on how to do things better in eSigning. The combination of ease-of-use and the openness of my proposal should help the digital transformation.

PDF Association: The PDF Days Online 2021 has become the leading PDF event. What makes the PDF Days so unique in your mind?

Carsten Heiermann: There is just no other place gathering basically thousands of man years of PDF industry experience. Foxit is a leading vendor in PDF Editing, PDF SDK and PDF Automation solutions, so we are proud to be a gold sponsor of PDF Days 2021!

PDF Association: Thank you! We look forward to seeing you at the PDF Days Online 2021.