Wednesday, March 3 2004
The larger a company or government entity gets, the more complicated its information flow becomes--and as a result, electronic document security becomes more complicated as well.
For example, some employees need access to vital information that other must be restricted from seeing. Customers need to keep their individual account information private, especially in the financial and healthcare sectors, where PDF has established an e-paper beachhead. And sales and marketing staff need to maintain current versions of product information and pricing data.
In late February, Adobe unveiled plans to rollout its Policy Server to address these concerns for large enterprises using PDF for document interchange. The software “sets policies”--manages privileges--for PDFs on a large scale, controlling authentication, auditing, expiration and revocation.
“PDF is used for a lot of different workflows. With many of our customers, the security aspects of PDF are important and well-understood,” says Adobe security evangelist John Landwehr. “And we have had a lot of feedback from customers who view PDF as a great format for providing more secure and reliable electronic document exchange. They were looking for even more controls that they could put on their documents.”
Policy Server gives them that, on the large network scale. Authors and/or IT managers can set who’s allowed to view a PDF, and whether or not a recipient can modify, copy, forward or print the document. Documents can sit on a given computer’s hard drive, but they can’t be opened until a person with the appropriate privileges comes along and logs in.
The software, of course, gives creators and network managers the ability to revoke privileges, too.
One key to Adobe Policy Server’s potential success in the market, Landwehr says, is its ability to plug into a company’s pre-existing network security settings to authenticate who is at the keyboard trying to access a PDF. This flexibility can make it more appealing to companies who want to leverage the security that’s already working for them.
“It’s essentially designed to help organizations secure their entire document lifecycle,” Landwehr says. “As documents are being generated, routed, used for forms, used for collaboration, sent back for processing and even tied back into archival, security is persistent and stays with the document.”
One problem with e-paper is that it’s more enduring than paper--it’s sometimes difficult to tell an old document from a new one. A feature of the software that syncs with either the network’s clock or the client computer’s clock can make a document expire, so no one can access it. This, Landwehr points out, has many applications, from making old price data go away to making sure that draft drawings aren’t mistaken for the ironclad final editions.
Another feature Policy Server offers is auditing: It can track who opens/prints/copies/cuts-and-pastes text from a PDF, or who attempted to do those things but wasn’t allowed.
Pilot projects will roll out this summer with early adopters; it will become available for purchase late this year, Landwehr says.
Source:
http://www.publish.com
