Protecting Training Courses with Safeguard PDF Security

  Training course copy protection and control

Training courses are very expensive to create and update.  They can often contain proprietary information or methods or know how.  They always contain the expertise of experienced instructors who have specialised in how to present very complex information in ways that make it easy to understand and quick to learn.  And increasingly, with the requirements of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) in all the professions, training courses have to be taken.

Training courses are delivered very flexibly.  Printed manuals are expensive, easily lost in the post and have a long lead time.  Also, many courses are delivered under license, so instructors may have to carry large blocks of paper around.  And in some cases, courses are given using the Internet to connect students to the instructor.

‘Going Digital’ with training courses is not technically difficult.  Presentation slides can be converted to PDF so they are consistent when viewed, and presenters and course notes can also be moved to that format readily today.  But a training course is not just a single document.  It is a whole family of documents.  And each document has different controls needed.

Here the Locklizard construct of the Publication is very valuable.  A complete course of training documents can be assigned to a single publication, but at the same time the controls on each document can be different.  This simplifies the course provider’s administration because they just allocate access to the publication (course) to their students or trainers, and Locklizard take care of the rest.  And you can allow users to print documents with or without watermarks, so course notes maybe do not need protecting with watermarks, but copies of slides probably do need watermarks because nobody wants to have their name all over pirated documents.

Locklizard also have a range of controls to help prevent the easiest forms of copying, such as Print Screen and detecting common screen grabbers such as Snagit, and covering over the Viewer window when it is not in focus.  There are controls available to set start and stop view dates so that courses can only be used by users for a finite length of time.  Also, you can dynamically cease access to presenters and users if they are not behaving correctly or are repeatedly trying to license unauthorised devices or make printed copies.

The Safeguard implementation guide for Training Course Providers addresses how training course providers can use Locklizard controls to simplify the creation of training course materials, and makes suggestions about how to simplify your administration for delivering courses direct to end customers or to instructors.