Many manufacturers of complex equipment or products need to provide technical manuals, training materials and a range of other information to their salesforce, field engineering teams, contractors and customers. These are often highly sensitive documents and it is important they do not fall into the wrong hands. Drumlin has been used by a number of major engineering firms specifically to deal with this issue in an extremely cost-effective manner.

Typically the Drumlin Pro+ edition is used. This enables very large numbers of secured PDFs (e.g. 100s or 1000s) to be created automatically, with a full set of security facilities applied - not simply strong encryption of the documents, but also date expiry, user-specific watermarking of any printout permitted, prevention of various forms of copying and similar controls. Secured PDFs are given the additional extensions .DRM or .DRMX depending on how they are generated. Details of how Drumlin can be used for such publishing are provided in the Welcome document.

Security with 'pre-authorization' for registered users (.DRM files): Most engineering customers choose to create DRM files which have been pre-defined to be readable only by a specific set of users. These users pre-register a copy of the free Drumlin software (or have it pre-installed and registered for them). They provide their registration ID to the engineering company. A list of users is created as a text file and then the relevant PDF files are converted using the Drumlin "Publish New Document" feature into fully secured files which can only be read by this list of users. The documents can then be provided to all these users, without concern that they might be copied elsewhere, as they are unreadable on any computer other than those selected. This can also be carried out for a single individual, creating a document at the time required or requested, by publishing it just for that person (i.e. that userID).

Security with 'post-registration authorization' (.DRMX files): Other customers do not know in advance what the IDs of their users will be. In this case the fully secured DRMX method is used. Each PDF file is converted by the Drumlin software to a fully secured version called a DRMX file. This can be sent to anyone and is completely secure. To read the document or documents the user must have an authorization code. They install and register Drumlin, as described above. They download (or receive on CD/by email) the DRMX file or files they require, and send an email request to the engineering company asking for an authorization code for the document(s). The central service provides the code (by email or automated delivery) and the customer uses the File menu, Authorize option, to convert the DRMX file to a fully readable DRM file, as before. This is a one-time process. Connection to the internet is required when authorization takes place, as this uses the central DRM facility to check the code is valid, and if so, the undertake the final generation of the readable DRM file that the user will read thereafter.

For more details, and example customer experiences , please contact us with your requirements

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