By Nettie Hartsock, Planet PDF

PlanetPDF interviews Thad McIlroy, editor and founder of “The Future of Publishing”, about the Adobe acquisition of Omniture and his predictions for how this could alter the ePublishing industry.

Read the full interview – Adobe buys Omniture: The story beneath the story and what it means for users

A decade ago, Adobe and future merger partner Glassbook published Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, a 16,000-word short story, as the first major eBook. Its digital rights management (DRM) failed as hackers hacked, King got mad, Amazon ended up giving it away. The eBook—and DRM—suffered a brutally black eye.

About the same time, iTunes rose and record labels struggled to rein in MP3 music pirates, DRM as a technology got beat up badly, caught in a riptide between freethinking music consumers and bottom-line-oriented copyright owners.

Adobe, somewhat quietly, released a product called Policy Server (currently part of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), and later, Digital Editions, to rights-manage documents and eBooks. Even it wasn’t without hitches, as arguments over text-to-speech features erupted between publishers—who reap revenue from audio books—and advocates for visually impaired readers.

Yet despite the hard knocks DRM has taken in the mainstream media, DRM has become an essential technology of the electronic documents world, protecting and tracking use of business-critical data. Without it, PDF would never have supplanted paper as the standard electronic document. Most businesses have some content, somewhere, that needs some level of protection—be it sensitive internal data circulating among employees or external communications going out to customers and partners.

DRM in the PDF world can mean a lot of things, from simply password security to more elaborate schemes. Typically, though, the DRM decision involves considering the following issues:

• Overcoming software issues: Some vendors offer DRM, but PDFs can only be read in a custom viewer or in Acrobat Reader only after installing a custom plug-in. While these schemes can be effective, they offer a layer of inconvenience and pose tech-help issues for already stretched IT staffers.

• Track or disable pass-alongs: For proprietary content like research reports or e-books that took a considerable investment to assemble, limiting opening to one computer can be a good business model—if people pass it along, it stays locked but offers the recipient and opportunity to purchase an unlocking code. At minimum, document owners can block pass-along recipients from opening a document until they register an email, snail mail, and phone number to get to the content—making viral marketing a lead-generation tool.

• Deciding what level of protection the document warrants. Maybe everyone can look at it onscreen, but you should disable printing, copy/paste functions, or offline access.

• Expiring a document. DRM offers owners of catalogs or drafts of documents a way to expire or update a document, which comes in handy when, for example, you need the 2008 price list to be rendered inoperable. Or it’s not advantageous to have a draft of a contract or purchase agreement floating around a company’s email system.

One final decision, as always, involves analyzing costs. The main upside to setting up your own server for PDF DRM is that you maintain custody of your documents at all times during the process. A much less expensive option is purchasing DRM on a per-document basis from a trusted vendor, who can host your documents online and can administer the DRM on your behalf and let your company test-drive DRM or roll it out on a small scale for a limited set of documents.

Although some vendors offer one form of PDF DRM (hosted or server-side) or another, only Vitrium is doing both right now with ProtectedPDF, offering a cost-effective means to phase-in DRM based on need, with upgrades available when they become necessary.

For those of us who build software, creating a new software product is usually fun and exciting. There are new challenges, the opportunity to use new tools and techniques, and there is a special thrill of seeing something work for the first time. But unless you have the luxury of building software solely for your own entertainment, once you’ve got that great new product built, you have to figure out how to get it to your customers. At Vitrium, much of the software that we build is web-based, so the issue of delivering software to our users is really just one of ensuring browser compatibility.

But if you work at a company that delivers software for the desktop, you typically have to build an installer — a second piece of software whose job is to get your actual software successfully running on the users’ machines. There is no joy in writing in installers. I’ve worked at companies where we had to build installers for our software, and it’s amazing how much time and effort was required to build and maintain them.

The reason for that is that the installer is a piece of software whose primary responsibility is to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the millions of computers out there. Different operating systems, different utilities, firewalls, proxy servers, pieces of software that have been removed or modified by the user — the list goes on. These are all things that could potentially cause your software not to work on a given computer. So the installer has to identify and, where possible, resolve these problems. And no matter how hard you try, there will always be a steady stream of issues that come up: combinations of software that the installer doesn’t handle, configurations that have never been seen before, software versions that behave in subtly different ways, even gracefully handling upgrading from previous versions of your own software.

That’s why, at Vitrium, it has always been our goal to produce software that doesn’t need installers. Our applications are delivered over the web. The PDF’s produced by our products use standard Adobe software that already exists on almost every computer on the planet. The result is that we have essentially no support costs related to getting our products onto people’s computers. And that is good for us, and for our customers.

PlanetPDF announces that Vitrium Systems has joined Adobe’s Solution Partner Program, which will help Vitrium in its quest to continually develop innovating and leading-edge PDF products. Partnering with Adobe will create new markets by allowing Vitrium to promote our solutions to Adobe’s customers globally. Learn more about the Adobe Solution Partner Program.

Read the full article here.

In anticipation of the upcoming release of Adobe Reader 9 and Adobe Acrobat 9, Vitrium Systems has launched an updated version of docmetrics. Learn how docmetrics can track your PDFs and become a useful marketing tool for capturing reader information.

To read the article Vitrium Systems Rolls out Docmetrics