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: [email protected] From: "Johnson, Joyce" <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: 03/03/2015 03:14 PM Subject: secured PDFs Sent by: [email protected] 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 [email protected]. Send list messages to [email protected]. To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/tom.beiswenger%40emhartglass.com Send administrative questions to [email protected]. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
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