TrueCertify Enables Electronic Delivery of Certified Documents
SOUTHFIELD- Until this month, those who needed a certified copy of a birth certificate, marriage license, death certificate, property deeds, or any other personal vital record, had only two choices. Order it by mail, pay a fee and wait, or trek to the county clerk's office, pay a fee, and wait in line to receive a paper copy affixed with a raised seal to verify the document's authenticity.
With the advent of TrueCertify, a new technology solution from the Southfield document management software provider ImageSoft Inc., there's now a third option available. TrueCertify allows courts and other government agencies to authenticate and deliver certified documents electronically and enables the recipient to verify the document contents via the Web.
Ottawa County, in west Michigan, is the first to adopt the TrueCertify technology. ImageSoft implemented TrueCertify at Ottawa County earlier this month.
"With TrueCertify in place, the county will benefit from cost saving and process efficiencies, while the citizens of Ottawa County will enjoy improved service with the added convenience of receiving certified documents through e-mail," said Dan Krueger, Ottawa county clerk.
TrueCertify provides an alternative to the raised seal traditionally used to certified document. It's a much more robust mechanism for assuring document authenticity that is virtually impossible to circumvent or forge.
"TrueCertify creates a paradigm shift in the way that document certification is performed," said Scott Bade, ImageSoft president. "The good news is the paradigm shift is towards a much more secure mechanism for ensuring downstream document authentication. After all, using a raised seal as a means of document authentication is archaic and ripe for fraud; just ask any Register of Deeds office about the abuses perpetrated in the housing market. The added security measures inherent in the TrueCertify system prevent tampering and help ensure document integrity."
Here's how TrueCertify works:
A clerk uses the TrueCertify software to create a special version of the target document that includes a unique certification page. The certification page identifies the document and provides an encryption key and a link to a Web portal from which the original document can be visually verified. (The portal can be set up on the customer's Web site or at www.truecertify.com.)
To ensure that all the pages are present and in proper order during the visual verification process, each page of the TrueCertify document is marked in the bottom margin with special identifying information.
To prevent the indefinite reuse of a TrueCertify document (which protects the clerk's office from third-party abuse of the process), it can be configured to expire within a specific time frame. Moreover, documents cannot be stolen from the TrueCertify portal because all documents are encrypted, and the encryption keys are kept by the clerk in a separate system.
A certified document from TrueCertify can be sent instantly via email as a PDF or can be printed and delivered in paper form to a waiting customer.
More at www.imagesoftinc.com.
