secured PDFs

Tue Mar 3 12:31:51 PST 2015

We used to deliver user guides as secured PDFs; however, the security 
settings in Acrobat 9 never fully suited our needs. We have since upgraded 
to Acrobat 12, but I haven't checked if the settings are any better. That 
said, securing the documents ended up being more pain than it was worth. 
Too many users wanted to extract pages or do other things that we deemed 
were OK. We dropped the securing documents years ago. I know there is fear 
that someone could steal some trade secret (I never found one in our 
manuals), but as long as you are distributing a document in either PDF or 
print, you have to assume that sooner or later your competition will 
manage to get a copy.

As far as protecting ourselves from someone modifying our documentation in 
a way that could expose us to liability for machine damage or personal 
injury, we cover ourselves (per the lawyers) by including disclaimers in 
the preface and noting that the documentation always remains our 
proprietary property and cannot be altered or duplicated without our 
permission. I'm sure that doesn't stop anyone, but the legal folks say 
that if a customer violates that clause, they place themselves at risk 
through no fault of ours.

Tom Beiswenger
Manager, Technical & Training Documentation, Project Manager - Inspection 
Business
Emhart Glass Mfg. Inc.
1140 Sullivan St.
Elmira, NY 14901
PH: +607 735-4279
FX: +607 734-8278
Mobile: +607 769-4779
Email: tom.beiswenger at emhartglass.com

From:   "Johnson, Joyce" <JJohnson at abtg.com>
To:     "framers at lists.frameusers.com" <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Date:   03/03/2015 03:14 PM
Subject:        secured PDFs
Sent by:        framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com

We deliver user guides (software and hardware) to customers  via 
password-protected pdfs, loaded onto servers and also posted on our 
customer web portal. 

I?m wondering how members of this group deliver customer-facing documents. 
Do you use pdfs? If so, do you secure those pdfs? If you secure them, how 
do you accommodate in-house colleagues who request unsecured pdfs so they 
can extract pages and images?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

Joyce

Joyce M. Johnson
AmerisourceBergen
Lead Technical Writer
Technology Group

1400 Busch Parkway
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089

847.808.5875
888.537.3102 ext 15875

www.abtg.com

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This electronic mail transmission may contain 
privileged and/or confidential information and is intended only for the 
review of the party to whom it is addressed. If you have received this 
transmission in error, please immediately return it to the sender, delete 
it and destroy it without reading it. Unintended transmission shall not 
constitute the waiver of the attorney-client or any other privilege.

 _______________________________________________

You are currently subscribed to framers as tom.beiswenger at emhartglass.com.

Send list messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com.

To unsubscribe send a blank email to
framers-unsubscribe at lists.frameusers.com
or visit 
http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/tom.beiswenger%40emhartglass.com

Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit
http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20150303/10217a99/attachment.htm>