Microsoft Corp.’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Group today announced it has joined the SAFE-BioPharma Association, a nonprofit association that created and manages the SAFE™ digital identity and signature standard for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.

As a SAFE vendor partner, Microsoft has developed a SAFE signing interface capability for use with the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, effectively providing researchers, vendors, regulators and clinicians with a security-enhanced way to verify their identities when creating, managing and sending electronic documents. The reference implementation interface is available as downloadable source code on the Microsoft Developer Network (http://www.msdn.com).

With the announcement, life sciences firms will now be able to implement a SAFE-certified public key infrastructure and identity management system leveraging Microsoft software products already used in their IT environments. Because SAFE is an implementation of the X.509 standard — and is supported in Microsoft Active Directory®, Microsoft Root CA Server and the Microsoft Certificate Lifecycle Manager — companies will be able to issue, manage and authenticate using SAFE certificates and a Microsoft-based infrastructure.