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.
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