ARena

Adobe made a couple of announcements today around our LiveCycle Policy Server product.

The announcements can be seen here and here, but as a brief summary:

Adobe Delivers New Cross-Format Rights Management Solution for More Secure Documents - essentially we have announced that LiveCycle Policy Server can now be used to protect naitive Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and CATIA formats, as well as PDF (of course!). Policy server is (I think) pretty cool - I know people have many different points of view on "rights management" or "control" (or information assurance as we like to call it!), but being able to update or revoke usage rights, confidently share information inside and outside the firewall and insure authorised usage only certainly has its uses!

Adobe also announced today Adobe Document Center, a hosted service that allows individuals to protect, control and track PDF, Word and Excel documents via the web.

Adobe Delivers New Hosted Service for Document Protection and Control Inside and Outside the Firewall -from the release..."this new, easy-to-use, web-based service gives business professionals the power to grant and dynamically revoke access to documents distributed inside or outside the firewall, as well as audit actions such as opening, adding comments to, or printing those documents". I think it is worth pointing out that Adobe Document Center isn't intended to be a web-based/hosted document storage service. It's designed as a way to securely share documents and information beween individuals and organisations, without fear of the document content or IP from getting into "the wrong hands."

I can see multiple uses for these technologies for the target audience of this blog.  As analysts, you are all sending information, IP, analysis and reports outside the firewall - some of it paid for, some of it for review.  How cool to be able to set some controls over these documents to ensure that only autorised individuals can see draft reports, that drafts can be revoked when the final report is published and to guarantee that reports (your IP) aren't emailed and printed-out once they are outside your firewall and your control!

For more information, visit http://dc.adobe.com.  If you want to learn more these release then drop me an email.