We were approached by one of our partners with an opportunity to develop and integrate a digital signature solution for a rental business – customers would go and rent equipment at a front desk and then sign a digital contract.

Infrastructure

The customers already had a running Microsoft Dynamics Business Central installation, which was handling the contracts, and we had to integrate the signature solution to with it.

The designated signature device was Wacom STU-530 – a versatile signature tablet, which we had already seen at other front desks.

The Solution

Out solution was to create a desktop application that would run on each POS terminal with a connected Wacom tablet. When a new contract is issued, Business Central would notify the corresponding desktop application by sending a request with an attached PDF and activate the signature pad. Once signed, the application would send back a signed PDF file with the contract to Business Central.

For this we used Wacom’s STU SDK in order to develop a Windows Forms desktop application that exposes a WCF web service for communication with Business Central.

PDF Integration

The signatures of the customers are stored in the PDF documents as digital ink. This provides the highest quality of output and PDF viewers detect the handwriting.

Providing the highest signature quality has technical difficulties such as converting tablet coordinates to PDF coordinates and signature scaling.