Contents

Overview

Professional Engineers are sometimes required to seal construction materials testing reports, or collections of test reports, in their capacity as a Professional Engineer. This requirement is often determined by project specifications or contracts and can vary by region where the work is performed or the type of entity responsible for commissioning. The process of attaching an engineering seal to a document carries with it more weight than a review of the results for correctness and general trends.

According to the National Society of Professional Engineers:

The act of signing and sealing engineering documents signifies that (1) the engineering work was prepared by the professional engineer or under the professional engineer’s direct control or personal supervision; (2) the signing and sealing professional engineer is of the opinion that the documents contained meet usual and customary engineering standards of practice; and (3) the documents are appropriate for review and approval by the appropriate code enforcement official.

Spectra QEST has partnered with Notarius (notarius.com) to deliver industry leading digital signing and sealing capabilities in Construction Hive. Any test report or document that requires a digital signature or Professional Engineering seal can now be sealed with a single click individually, or in bulk, in Construction Hive.

Prerequisites

Before digital seals can be applied to documents the following prerequisites must be met:

1. From the Digital Sealing Company Checklist and Setup page
   1. Commercial agreement with Spectra QEST to use digital sealing must be in place
   2. Commercial agreement with Notarius for CertifiO for employees must be in place
   3. End user workstation must have CertifiO Manager and the Entrust ESP client installed
   4. End user workstation is able to communicate with Notarius servers
   5. The user performing the signing action has been granted Digital Seal User role in Construction Hive
2. The user performing the sealing action will need to have completed the steps outlined in Digital Seal User Setup.

The QEST Platform administrator will be able to advise if the prerequisites from step 1 are in place.

Applying a Digital Seal to an Individual Document

When these conditions are met, the document details page will display a Seal Document button beside the revision listing. Clicking this button will seal the currently selected document revision. If required, the user will be prompted to manually position the digital seal. For more information, see Digital Seal Position and Appearance below.

During the sealing process, the user will be prompted by CertifiO Manager for their certificate credentials.

Invalid credentials will result in the sealing action being abandoned and an error being displayed related to a CertifiO Manager error. Entering valid credentials will complete the signing process.

Once a document revision has been successfully sealed, a "Document is sealed" ribbon will appear below the revision section:

When a document revision is sealed, a Sealed Event will also be shown in the Report History stating when the document was sealed and by whom.

If the document revision could not be successfully sealed, an error message explaining the reason for the failure will appear on the page instead.

Bulk Sealing Documents

Currently un-sealed Documents can be sealed in bulk from the search page.

Finding Documents to Seal

Filtering can be applied on the Advanced Search page to limit search results to sealed or unsealed documents.

Document listings will show a shield icon to indicate when a document's latest revision has been sealed.

Bulk Applying Seal to Documents

Seals can be applied to documents shown on the search results page by using the Seal dropdown.

The dropdown provides the option of sealing only those documents that have been manually selected or all of the documents returned in the search, up to the first 100 documents. After selecting the Seal dropdown option, a dialog is shown asking the user to confirm the action.

When the Seal button on this dialog is pressed, the latest revision of each document will be sealed one by one. As each document sealing completes, the dialog will list documents that were sealed successfully and the documents that could not be sealed. These lists can be expanded to show more details.

The process for bulk sealing documents can be cancelled. Cancelling the process will not stop the currently processed document from being sealed, but will prevent any further documents from being sealed.

Digital Seal Position and Appearance

The digital seal is always applied to the first page of the document. It is comprised of the following elements:

• The digital seal image. This uses the image and diameter specified in the user's digital seal configuration.
• A text box containing the name of the sealer and date of the sealing in the format of User Name, DD-MMM-YYYY (e.g. John Smith, 04-Feb-2020)
• A text box containing the additional text of the digital seal, if configured.

For QEST Plaform reports, including QESTField Forms and the Daily Summary Field Report, the digital seal will be automatically positioned within the header of the report. The position is currently fixed as below using specifications based on the US Letter page size.

• The top edge of the digital seal is 0.08" below the top of the page
• The center of the digital seal is 3.91" from the left edge of the page
• The Name/Date and Additional Text text boxes extend from the edge of the seal to the edge of the page, and can span additional lines if necessary. This text will be reduced from 10pt to 6pt to minimize the number of lines required.

For all other documents, including External Reports and Milestone Reports, the user must manually position the digital seal. They will be prompted for the seal position when attempting to seal these documents.

The circular area represents the position of the digital seal image. The user can drag this circle over the thumbnail of the page into the desired position.

The rectangular areas represent where text will appear - the left hand box for the Name/Date and the right hand box for Additional Text (if configured). These are positioned relative to the digital seal and cannot be moved separately. The user can adjust the width of these text boxes, and the box on the preview will automatically change height to fit the number of lines necessary for the new width.

Publishing Already Signed Documents.

If a pdf file containing a digital signature is published to Construction Hive the document will be considered sealed

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