secured PDFs

[Ken Poshedly]

In addition to hard-copies of our manuals included in the operator cab of the heavy construction equipment my company manufactures and markets worldwide, we also make available pdf files of our manuals with passwords to prevent changes, copying text & images, etc.

So far, we're not aware of any plagiarism or other unauthorized use of our stuff. At least not yet.

-- Ken in Atlanta



On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 3:33 PM, "tom.beiswenger at emhartglass.com" <tom.beiswenger at emhartglass.com> wrote:
 

>
>
>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 
>  
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