M-Files out of the box signing solution

In M-Files, an electronic signature is always tied to a workflow state transition or to an assignment completion, where end users provide system credentials to complete the action.

After providing the user credentials and the reason for transition, the signing event is logged in the event log.

Let’s pause for a moment and review the terminology used so that we are all on the same page.

Relying on Code of Federal Regulation (21 CFR Part 11) definitions, specific to electronic records and electronic signatures, including electronic submissions to the Food and Drug Administration:

• An electronic signature is computer data compilation of any symbol or series of symbols executed, adopted, or authorized by an individual to be the legally binding equivalent of the individual’s handwritten signature.

• A digital signature is an electronic signature based upon cryptographic methods of originator authentication, computed by using a set of rules and a set of parameters such that the identity of the signer and the integrity of the data can be verified.

As you may understood, legal concept comes into play to prove who signed what based on signer’s intent and consent. All gathered data around signing process is saved to M-Files database either in text properties and/or in dedicated electronic signatures objects that can be optionally rendered into a PDF.

Hence, rest assured, all M-Files signing solutions fulfill the technical requirements of common regulatory guidelines such as 21 CFR Part 11 and EU GMP Annex 11.

This said, note that PDF processing is mostly used to set up the final document signed. Possibly, additional overlays, watermark stamping and other metadata information are generated. Portable Document Format contributes heavily to stick to authenticity, conformity and falsification detection. To achieve that, a cryptography-based process is used in digital signature, ensuring signed documents authenticity, providing tampering detection and saving digital signature certificate to document files.

Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Trusted Digital Signature

PDF documents can be digitally signed with digital signature certificates. Typically, for two purposes:
– To prove the identity of the signer
– To prove that the document has not been modified after signing
There are two kinds of digital signature certificates: hardware-based and software-based.

This solution is very useful to sign PDF files (only) with digital signature certificates installed on your M-Files server. This requires a license and, unfortunately, is not supported in M-Files Cloud.

M-Files for DocuSign

DocuSign cloud service is a web application that can be used to digitally sign PDF documents. You still compose the document in M-Files, but then, move it to the “Sent for signing” state in dedicated workflow so it will automatically be uploaded to DocuSign to handle signing process. Of course, all signers receive an email assignment.

M-Files for Adobe Acrobat Sign

Similarly, using Adobe Acrobat Sign cloud service allows M-Files users and external persons to edit and sign documents remotely. Sender(s) and signer(s) receive e-mail notification without requiring any Adobe subscription for signers.

From an M-Files technical point of view, in both above solutions, as always, configuration is all about Workflows settings, Object types, Classes and Properties definitions. Agreed that it is managed by your Business needs.

Hence, your M-Files Business Administrator will bring all this to life, mapping required metadata properties into “M-Files for DocuSign” or “M-Files for Adobe Acrobat Sign” application vault console:

Last but not least, do not forget to consider these Signing Cloud Services solutions plans and subscriptions prerequisite. By default, licenses bound to one or another service are not integrated into M-Files add-on modules potentially subscribed. The way one may choose such or such features is totally tied in firms business processes and the amount/volume of end users documents signatures generated monthly.

Eventually, you may also consider to use additional M-Files modules such as PDF processor or Electronic Signatures from M-Files Compliance Kit. This will allow you to greatly extend your Business tasks capabilities and facilitate in a way signing process integration.

Do not hesitate to contact dbi services If you need assistance, for any M-Files support and guidance around this topic and others.

L’article M-Files Electronic and Digital Signatures est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

Once upon a time in IT project land

What an achievement, it’s been a good while your team is working on a huge project and it’s finally completed. All related documentation is well registered and managed into your knowledge workers enterprise content management, M-Files.

Time to get some rest and move on other tasks. Hence time is passing until dark moments show up and bring your attention to round to review and check your previous project documents to find answers regarding colleagues questionings. Bad luck, it looks like several content have disappeared. Even worse, you discovered others are corrupted. Leaving aside the root cause of all this, your first objective now is to retrieve your precious documents. And guess what, backups are your best friends.

M-Files deployment context

Before considering technical details, let’s assume your M-Files vault(s) is on-premise deployed. Note that if you are working with M-Files Cloud vault(s) then M-Files Corporation is maintaining and backing up your vault for you. M-Files Cloud offers a default standard backup service as part of every M-Files subscription. Moreover, it is possible to extend your backup capabilities based on retention and recovery point settings.

This said, do mind we shall have different situations:

• M-Files Server + Microsoft SQL Database + object files distributed either on a single server or across multiple servers
• M-Files Server + Firebird SQL Database + object files only on a single server

One must admit Firebird SQL Database is a nice choice when you start working with M-Files in order to be confidant quickly and easily with the tool. But keep in mind, as soon as you are managing millions of objects, furthermore in a production context, it is highly recommended to review your local server infrastructure and consider working with / migrating to Microsoft SQL database.

M-Files server-specific data

Whatever M-Files configuration type is in place, you must always take care of your master database. This is where server-specific data reside and it is always stored in an embedded Firebird SQL database. Information stored are:

• Information on transactions since the last backup
• Login accounts
  • M-Files login passwords
  • Personal information
  • License types
  • Server-level roles
• Scheduled jobs
• Notification settings
• Licenses
• M-Files Web settings

As you can imagine, these information are important and must be taken into account with care as much as your Document Vault backup does. Hence, I would recommend to take regular Master Database backups according to your needs and system criticality.

M-Files vault-specific data

According to database software used to store these information, either an embedded Firebird or Microsoft SQL server, M-Files provides you the possibility to do full and differential backup. Differential backups contain changes since the last full backup which includes all object files and vault metadata such as:

• Objects with their version history, files, and metadata
• Value lists, property definitions and classes
• Metadata structure
• Users, user groups and named access control lists
• User permissions and vault roles
• Workflows
• Connections to other systems
• Event log
• Vault applications and scripts

Note it is possible to store object files inside Microsoft SQL server database, whereas this is not an option with Firebird (always stored in file system). Nevertheless, this may lead to performance issues in large environment and should be consider with care if not avoided.

In case of using embedded Firebird database, simply schedule all vaults back up jobs in M-Files Admin.

With Microsoft SQL server database engine, you must back up both the Microsoft SQL database and the files in the file system separately. It is important to always back up Microsoft SQL database first and then the file system data to avoid any references to non-existing object files.

Other data to consider

Some secondary data are not saved during above backup procedures. Instead, these are re-created after a restore operation. Think about index files, PDF renditions and thumbnails stored on M-Files server hard drive and pay attention to rebuilding duration. In large vault, the amount of time to rebuild search indexes can take a lot of time. Hopefully, it is feasible to back up and restore them accordingly. Depending on search engine used, procedure can be slightly different but feasible.

Last, do not forget any system modification(s) such as Windows registry, notification message templates or whatever M-Files Server installation folder files since these will not be included in Master or Vault backups.

Advices

Things are always easier said than done but it might get even worse than ever if you do not pay attention to few M-Files backup best practices. Hardware failure, accidental deletions, cyberattack, logical and or human errors happen. To be prepared to face such issues:

• Plan, do, act and check your backup plan considering your systems criticality, Business and end-users SLA and constraints.
• Do not hesitate to lean on your IT Administrator support teams and M-Files Architect to validate choices made and review potential architecture weakness.
• Avoid taking data file system snapshot on active M-Files system servers where data is stored (inconsistency and damaged files may occurred).
• Apply the 3-2-1 backup strategy for the best (store 3 copies of your data, in at least 2 types of storage media with1 in a secure off-site location)

On top of this, OR/DR test exercise shall prevent and reveal most of your backup plan gap(s). Thus you will be prepared to solve backups issues validating, in passing, their integrities.

If you need further assistance, do not hesitate to contact dbi services for any M-Files support and guidance around this topic and others.

Enjoy your knowledge work automation tasks with M-Files.

L’article M-Files Backup considerations est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

Let’s see how M-Files Ment solution will help you to achieve this goal assuming your environment has been properly installed and set up (take a look here)

1. “Hiring contract” use case

In order to edit, send, sign and register a brand-new hiring contract to a future new employee/recruit, C-Management and HR Administration teams have to create such document and fill in several information and data, according to candidate residence, subsidiary and so on.

Prior entering into this procedure, applicant will have already completed all prerequisite job interviews and sent his CV to the company accordingly. This part is out of the scope of this blog but it could of course be managed with dedicated M-Files workflow.

Hence, as soon as C-Management team members agree to pursue with the chosen one, they informed HR Administration responsible team member to create a new hiring contract with all needed applicant and job information.

During Word document draft, HR Administration responsible team member will fill in below information in applicant mother tongue language, say Swiss French or Swiss German for simplicity:

• Applicant Name
• Applicant Address
• Applicant Email Address
• Job title category (such as Back office, Consultant or SD-Consultant)
• Subsidiaries incorporation

2. Welcome to M-Files Ment

As soon as you reach your M-File Ment company welcome page, depending on your user profile, you have the choice to choose between different menus. At most, with “Admin” user rights yow will get access to all below functionalities:

Additionally, an extra “Videos” menu is provided so you can watch quick short videos explaining how to handle the different software features.

3. Automate template

3.1 New template settings

As you can guess, let’s start by the beginning and automate a new template

Fill in the different fields. Some are mandatory such as “Template name” (clear enough), “Document styles” (see section 3.11 for details) and “Available for”

Let’s set “Template Name” field to “Hiring Contract – English Question(s)” in our example.
It is possible to categorize your template using specific “Category” keyword(s) so you can filter based on these categories and retrieve the right template when you want to generate new document(s). Similarly, you can also tag your template to make your search in archives easier.

“Available for” field is used to allow which Ment user profile (Admin, Author, Manager or User) can use the template:

Below a slight description helping to understand what this template relates to

You may have observed that you can “Use M-Files vault as the datasource” to rely on its content to achieve your purpose. We are using “dbi – Ment” vault where several object types, classes and properties were created.

3.2 Document styles

As soon as you will start creating a template, you will have to use a dedicated document “Style”. Depending on your needs and most probably Microsoft Word document text format content you are targeting, you will either use “Basic 2.0” default one or have to create your own.

See “Basic 2.0” example:

Amend the different elements of your “Document style” from the right hand side drop down menu like headings and paragraphs and check the preview reflecting the changes you made on the left. Don’t forget to save your changes hence documents that use your style will be modified accordingly. It is entirely possible to change a document style after you originally chose one during the first uploading template step creation. Moreover, if you create a template with several automated documents. it is also possible to use specific “Document styles” for each of them:

At this stage, we need to look at M-Files “dbi – Ment” vault quickly to avoid any confusion about objects we will interact with.

4. M-Files “dbi – Ment” vault objects

For the exercise, we will use “Sandra Applicant” person object with below metadata properties

And dbi services Delémont Office metadata properties

All above objects have been set in M-Files vault by accountable user as prerequisite.
Now that everything is in order, let’s go back to M-Files Ment and complete our task.

5. “Hiring contract” template creation

5.1 Import document text content source

Set a document name.

Then you can either choose to upload your Word .docx file source.

Or click on “Add document” and start to write down directly your text.

Let’s choose this second option and add all our necessary document text content.
Remember, at the end, the result is to produce either a Swiss French content version or a Swiss German one.

Hence, the order of appearance is not really important at all since this will be managed later through block automation next steps.
Save your changes.
Before we move on, you have certainly observed that our style is not yet applied.
To do so, we need to select each text element (title, header, table, lists)

and use the proper menu corresponding to our needs (adjusting fonts and margins accordingly).
Example with “Heading 1”:

Once this action completed, you can preview your document selecting “Preview” button to visualize your final document style version:

Let’s assume our format is completed successfully for both sections

Now here comes the power of Ment.

5.2 One, two, three – add automation

All automations are done in three steps:

• Select the text and automation
• Define the question
• Combine the text and the answer

These stand in below menu:

“Free text field(s)” give the users the possibility to generate any text to the document.
“Inline automation” don’t give the users the possibility to generate any text, but to select between the options you have created.
“Block automation” give the users the possibility to select between the options you have created

5.3 Automation examples

Let’s define a block automation selecting the whole Swiss German text section first

Click on “Block automation” menu

A new panel opens requesting the author to define a question leading, according to answer(s) definition, to fill in the document target content.

Select “Add a new question” and the type corresponding to your needs

Finally click “Next” and combine the answer to the text selected

Then “Done”, and here you are

Repeat these steps with the second Swiss French section to combine the second answer of this first question. But this time, we will “choose an existing question”

and select the corresponding answer “FR” to combine text section previously selected

Then “Done”. In Ment author interface, the result is presenting now with 2 yellow blocks bounded to one question “Hiring contract language version”, used two times as text generated in targeted document will be either in French or German.

Click on “Preview” to visualize and test your automated document

From here, I’m pretty sure you are starting to perceive the growth potential of this tool and hopefully that’s just a beginning.
Let’s carry on with a “Free text field(s)” automation. This time, we will rely on M-Files vault metadata introduced in section 4.

Select the text “Person Full Name” and “Free text field(s)” automation

Select “dbi – Ment” M-Files vault data source where our metadata are located

Add a new question. The tip here is to avoid creating repetitive questions to fulfill different part of the document. Instead, anticipate and group answer elements to update these information accordingly all in one. In this example, job applicant (Person) “Address Full Name” will be set and provided with his/her “Person Full Name”.

Select “Person” M-Files vault object class

Choose “Person Full Name” property

And additionally “Address Full Name” property

Click “Next”.
Finally, combine the answer to the text field originally selected

click “Done”.
Half part of this “Select Applicant / Person details” question completed.

Repeat this procedure for “Address Full Name” as mentioned before and choose an existing question (you guessed in advance which one)

And “Done”.
As a result, both fields are now automated as expected. Notice question / automation usage incrementation

Now, if you remember, we would like to have these information as well in Swiss French version of this document. Then let’s go for it. Not a big deal since a simple copy/paste of our automated fields should accomplish the job.

Do not forget to save your changes. Notice again question / automation usage incrementation.

All good. What about the preview of these automation ?

• Swiss German version

• Swiss French version

At the end, in order to let Ment users generate a document based on one template, an admin or the author has to publish it.

All these steps let you foresee what you can achieve with M-Files Ment.

6. What’s next

This brief introduction to M-Files Ment shows you what an author or admin can do to automate document generation based on template(s) for knowledge workers.
This is not all. Combining these document templates to M-Files workflows can leverage your Business organization to achieve and automate complex tasks with finest controls and results.
I encourage you to watch our recordings (FR version or DE version).
Enjoy watching and do not hesitate to contact us for any project integration or support.

L’article M-Files Ment: no code document automation solution in practice est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

M-Files people rallied around us:

Tero Antila – Director EMEA Partner Sales
Helinã Mellanen – Senior Enablement Manager
Emilie Feat – Senior Partner Manager Switzerland
Sebastian Wegener – Senior Partner Manager Germany & Austria
Joachim Bleicher – Senior Partner Sales Engineer
Mustapha Laouari – Sales Engineer

After a great morning coffee, few M-Files Business overview (goals and future plan strategy) and Networking, I decided to follow the different technical tracks presented by Joachim and Mustapha.

New M-Files Desktop

If you are quite familiar with M-Files, most probably, you have used the current M-Files Desktop client:

M-Files New Desktop objective is to streamline the different client interfaces such as Classic and new M-Files Web client or M-Files Mobile you are using in order to access your vault documents. Currently, those client UIs may lead to some confusion for end users and could be frustrated in terms of functionality and/or interactivity limitations. It is built on modern web technologies and have a fresh look and feel. A single code base has been used for this new M-Files Desktop and M-Files Web client.

Already available in October 2024, it should fasten access to new capabilities with its updated design, updated such as Aino tab (assistant in M-Files to help users find information), improved filter view and made easier vault navigation. No more “M:” drive used. Even if classic desktop client remain the default for now, transition should minimize disruption and users will still have the possibility to toggle to and from the new client version.

New capabilities will come in a near future:
– Create view
– Home screen
– Drag & drop to Windows
– Visitor links
… and much more

Last technical words, in order to make this operational, you will have to enable gRPC connection protocol on your M-Files server (something you do not have to take care of if using M-Files cloud solution – ready for use). As well, consider the below while operating the transition:

• UI extension applications require the new application framework, UIX Framework 2.0
• Compliance Kit compatibility: a new CK version will be released which will be compatible with the new client (including object creator and version control modules (most used modules))

M-Files for Outlook PRO

Here is the current Outlook context/situation:

Today, you shall save all your important emails to one M-Files safe space: apply metadata (only relevant metadata need to be filled), save attachments and even automate filling with customizable Outlook folder rules through Outlook interface. Now it seems that more and more features will come:

Cloud update

No doubt that M-Files Cloud is taking up more and more room: saving time to value, with less effort keeping security, compliance and high availability.

M-Files trial is now available for partners (partner program fee).

Includes cloud hosting on Standard Cloud as well as M-Files Aino with 1GB semantic index. Check for additional services as needed:

M-Files Manage and Identity Management

Quick review regarding the concept of identity management in M-Files:

• User provisioning
• Authentication (Windows, M-Files and Federated authentication)
• M-Files Manage

As you may know, vaults users are always mapped to “Login accounts”

In Cloud, M-Files Manage is used to add users manually and Microsoft Entra ID preferred with M-Files Login Service (out of the box, easy option).

Latest M-Files Manage updates allow to copy existing template vaults directly in M-Files Cloud from 2 different subscriptions. An application account can be used to get access to M-Files.

Moreover, cloud vault deletion and mass operation (mass license/user changes/operations) are coming soon.

M-Files Aino & Copilot connector

M-Files Aino (cloud service requiring a connection to M-Files Cloud) is an AI assistant that can summarize documents and give responses about document contents. Connectivity, confidentiality and accuracy are elements of this successful generative AI solution.

Ask something and get answers in a particular context (vault or properties metadata-driven context)

… even with documents in other languages.

Aino can be used with any text based document. Behind the scene, an additional module, “Aino Usage: Semantic Index” need to be installed. Consider also carefully Aino indexer configuration settings and index storage size as directly proportional to the amount of text in (only active) documents.

M365 Copilot integration (M-Files connector for Copilot – included in Business Platform Edition but not in Business LE) is ensuring that content in M-Files is available to M365 Copilot users. It can be used independently from Aino.

With this Connector for Copilot, users can access all the content in M-Files with the same Copilot user interface. It publishes selected information from M-Files to Microsoft 365 platform so that Copilot can refer to it when doing its work (information retains the permission in M-Files, i.e, same M-Files read permission access). When clicking a referenced document, it will take the user right to the document in M-Files.

Update on Collaboration possibilities

• Teams

As a reminder, external users will access Teams Channel but only internal users can see what is in M-Files through Teams (concurrent user license). Here’s the roadmap:

Some nice features, improvements to come such as Teams channel posts’ attachments store and access

• Hubshare

M-Files Hubshare is a full web application that is developed in C#, updated monthly. Additionally, a new version of the M-Files Plugin for Hubshare is published every 3 months. Below are 2024 highlight resumed.

Some objectives and improvements coming for Hubshare:

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot ongoing and I hope you did find, (re-)discover how M-Files ecosystem is rich and lively. If you plan to use, improve or discover them in your current and future Business Processes integration, please, do not hesitate to contact us for any support.

L’article M-Files Regional Partner 2024 (Geneva) est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

At least, If you are quite familiar with these functions, you may have already worked with “Insert Property” option in order to automate filing a Word document (set as standard or template in M-Files) with related M-Files metadata properties.

Principle

Basically, fill automatically text fields or cells in one template with the selected properties when a user creates a new document.

Very simple example illustration: create a Word file template listing document, add a title using M-Files metadata “Name or title” corresponding property

• Click on “Insert Property” button
• M-Files “Insert M-Files Property” dialog opens
• Double-click on “Name or title” property to add corresponding “Current Value” to Word document right where you placed your cursor

Easy and very helpful.
Until there, no such a big deal, you may think. In a sense, I concur.

Multi-select value list property

From time to time, you may have to deal with one particular M-Files metadata property data type i.e “Choose from list (multi-select)“, such as in below “Job title” example.

Insert this kind of property inside your Word document template, just like any others.

Now, suppose linking your Word document template object to a Workflow (main M-Files Knowledge Workers Business admin core activity, isn’t it ?). Consider you need to populate several fields with multi-select list values. Furthermore those values are empty during the very first state.

Contextualizing

* One simple Word document (Job title listing) flagged as “Is template” via M-Files property
* One M-Files metadata property (job title) set as multi-select data list among potentially others

1st difficulty that arises you may think about is the number of element management in the list. Since end user is free to add 1 to N elements available from the predefined list, it will be hard to anticipate it and set it accordingly unless your Workflow and Business case specifications lead you to control it through the different states.
In other words, either you control in advance the whole element list values you’d like to add in your target Microsoft Office 365 document or you will have to compose with the expected needs to insert these fields accordingly (probably by developing or scripting a bit) to achieve your goal without producing a document with missing or blank field values. I will leave this to reader expertise.

Back to Word template document structure

Let’s assume we have only 2 job titles values in our list.
Remember, in our case, “job title” list isn’t filled in yet and left blank.
Fire, check out, open my Word file template and insert both fields:

Hum … looks like something is not fully accessible:

See, only insert “Job title” and “Job title #1” list value seems to be available!
Anyway, let’s add them both, save our template document and check in it back to M-Files control:

To test and look at the content, I created a new document based on this template and selected 2 values from “Job title” list:

So, I guess you get the point. We have “Job title” M-Files property which is a kind of CSV with semicolon containing all list values set on M-Files metadata card’s document. Then “Job title #1” corresponding to the first value set at first position on “Job title” list property.
OK, but what’s about interacting with other list values, then ?

Solution / Workaround

First of all, this behavior should not confuse you . This is the way it is and is not really a bug. In order to retrieve the second “Consultant” value, let’s edit the field in Word to better understand its construction.
Check out Word template file, place your cursor into the first M-Files property field inserted corresponding to “Job title #1” and right click to pop-up “Toggle Fields Codes” option:

Here we are with this wonderful string “MFiles_PG12B4EA3AD6924B1BA8C780532C5E43BAn1“. If you are quite familiar with M-Files, you shall identify 12B4EA3AD6924B1BA8C780532C5E43BA as the unique ID registered for “Job title” property:

And finally guess that n1 at the end corresponds to value list position set. I’m pretty sure, now, you know how to handle it.
Check out Word template document, duplicate this field and increment n1 to n2, save and check in it:

Voilà !

Hoping it shall help you and save a bit of your time while trying to achieve Office 365 – Word template writing – interacting with M-Files property list.

Feel free to contact us for any support on our Enterprise Content Management solutions.

L’article M-Files & Microsoft Office 365: multi-select list property in Word est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.