Training and courseware applications
Training materials, educational and academic books, and courseware are highly valuable documents. It is important they cannot be copied, plagiarised or fall into the wrong hands. Drumlin can deal with this issue in an extremely simple and cost-effective manner. There are several options that provide an easy way to manage materials and ensure students cannot onward distribute them.
As Adrian Hunt, Director of educational publishers Management Pocketbooks (http://www.pocketbook.co.uk/) explains:
"We have been in business for virtually 25 years. Delivering our content to customers electronically offers great opportunities. However, our future hinges on protecting our intellectual property and that means safeguarding our ebooks from illegal use. We researched extensively the options for securing our PDFs and found the Drumlin solution both affordable and effective. The icing on the cake has been the support we have received - nothing short of outstanding."
Drumlin 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 .DRMZ or .DRMX depending on how they are generated, or can be wrapped into a simple Javelin "Click and Go" executable (EXE) file (MS Windows only).
- PDF files can be created from Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations (e.g. as slides or handout format) and many other formats, and these may then be secured using the standard Drumlin PDF reader/publisher facilities
- Students can be supplied with a set of DRMZ, EXE or DRMX files on CD or via Web download - via standard web links or using a course management system such asMoodle
- Software supplied by us (Drumlin and Javelin) can be branded to match corporate logos, weblinks and preferred language etc
- Usage restrictions may be applied to these files - no printing, or perhaps "print once with user-specific watermarking", no copying of text etc., expires at the end of the semester etc.
- Students are issued with authorization codes, one for each document, so their access to the files and their usage can be tracked centrally
- Course lecturers can use the Full screen mode on theJavelinPDF reader (Windows version) for presentations, using a mouse or a remote controller for a digital projector
- Training rooms can be set up with files pre-loaded, ready for use - this arrangement can use Drumlin plus theUserListfacility or theJavelinPDF reader with secured PDF files
- Reports on usage can be generated, tailored to customer's requirements, via our DRM service. Alternatively an Enterprise solutionmay be preferred, with the DRM service hosted on the client's own servers
- Web Hosted PDFs for training applications, i.e. courseware can be provided for clients not wishing to have a large number of separate files distributed to many students - access control systems can ensure only those files that are appropriate for a student/course are displayed
Case study 1: Commercial training organizations, Europe and Asia
These organizations have training center customers (who use large on-site networks of computers) plus students off-site who also need to use the same or similar training materials. The source files (PDF documents) for the training centers have been converted into secure PDFs using the Drumlin software. The secure format selected for the largest center was "Basic DRM" plus UserList functionality, as this is a simple and inexpensive option for facilities of this type. Each PC in the training room has Drumlin installed and registered, so the set of userIDs were known and could be included in the UserList for the secured files. This avoids the need for online authorization whilst ensuring the files are kept secure - they can only be read on the set of PCs that match the entries in the UserList. The utility program, DRMEdit, also allows the training center managers the ability to add or remove PCs from the approved list without regenerating the secured files. For off-site users the fully secure DRMX or DRMZ format was chosen, with online authorization and the Javelin reader.
Case study 2: Academic textbook: Geospatial Analysishttp://www.spatialanalysisonline.com/
An example application is the provision of otherwise expensive-to-print books in secure electronic format. The academic text "Geospatial Analysis" is provided via a website as a free web-based edition and as a special (secure) PDF using Drumlin's Javelin PDF reader plus a single .DRMZ file (for use on PCs, Macs, Android tablets and iPADs). Currently this ebook is used in more than 100 countries. Students taking MSc programs at various universities around the world are also provided with the special secure PDF free of charge as part of their courseware
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