How can I create digital signatures for my users using Windows 2008 Active Directory Certificate Services?

Question

Hi,
I need to create local digital signatures for my users. How can I do that using W2k8 Active Directory Certificate Services? We are gonna sign Office 2010 documents.
What company offers cheap digital signatures solutions?
Thanks in advanced

Answer 1

Consider the following:
if you use your local CA server to issue digital signature certificates, there is no cost, because you are eligible to issue so many certificates as you need. However, documents signed by these certificates will be considered trusted only within your AD
forest and other machines that explicitly trust your local CA. Any external client will not trust your signatures.
If you want to make your signature trusted outside your network (say, in worldwide), you need to pruchase a certificate from trusted commercial CA (VeriSign, GoDaddy, GlobalSign, StartCom, etc) according to respective vendor price list. In that case you
don't need to have your local CA server, because it is not used. All certificate management is performed by the external CA. A most common scenario is to purchase signing certificate for particular departament principals (head managers) or few certificates
for a whole company (all documents are revised by a responsible person or persons who holds signing certificate and sign them after review).
so, it is not clear from your post what exactly you need.
My weblog: http://en-us.sysadmins.lv
PowerShell PKI Module: http://pspki.codeplex.com
Windows PKI reference:
on TechNet wiki