The support comes in the form of an Office plug-in. Users will be able to apply policies, which are stored on the server, to their documents as they are being creating, using a two-step wizard in the usual Word or Excel interface, according to John Landwehr, Adobe’s director of security solutions and strategy
Documents secured in such a way can only be accessed by users who authenticate themselves to the server and have the appropriate access rights. The documents can then be forcibly expired or rendered inaccessible at a set time, should the policy require it, which can be useful for version control as well as security.
As well as Office, the software will also now support Dassault Systemes’ CATAI brand of CAD software. In this case, information about products can be secured at the file level or down to the component level. You could secure apply different policies to an engine and a chassis within the same CAD file, for example.
A lot of manufacturing companies have a lot of intellectual property wrapped up in these CAD files and they are outsourcing and offshoring all around the world, said Landwehr. The software is designed for use on intranets and extranets for this reason.
Adobe also plans to start offering Policy Server as a hosted service called Document Center. If you have the Office plug-in or Acrobat 8, for a monthly or annual fee you will be able to apply policies to your work without having to run the Policy Server on your own network.
Patrice Lagrange, Adobe’s director of hosted services marketing and product management, said that the company plans to roll out more upgrades to this service throughout 2007. This will start off meaning 1GB of online document storage, and will eventually mean more hosted tools for managing document workflow.
