Microsoft Office Adds Blockchain Verification
Documents created using Microsoft Office can now be verified and certified with a blockchain check.
Stampery has added Microsoft Office to its platform, allowing the ability to certify and verify documents against both ethereum classic and bitcoin blockchains via a web page and also through a programmatic application protocol interface (API).
A Microsoft spokesman said organizations and individuals need to record and secure important documents every day, particularly with legal documents and business contracts.
“An alternative to relying on a single entity (commercial, public, government, etc.) to keep such proof of identity safe is to create a hash of the document and send that hash to the publicly accessible blockchain, such as bitcoin,” said Microsoft senior engineer Ville Rantala. “Once the hash data is present on the public blockchain, the document can’t be changed without invalidating the hash. This approach guarantees both the document’s privacy and the data’s availability for future validation purposes.
To enable this capability, Stampery provides a RESTful API that is accessible from applications. The Stampery blockchain add-in for Microsoft Office communicates over REST with an Azure Node.js server, which then calls the Stampery API.
A statement from Stampery claims the API is a “convenient add-in to Microsoft Outlook that performs like a near-native feature to stamp/certify and email without leaving Outlook, or even the specific email that you are viewing. The solution provides document certification (creation of a stamp) and verification (checking a document against a stamp) in Office using the Stampery API and the public blockchain.”
