Document Tracking & Document Control
Tracking Documents and Controlling Use
Why track documents?
Seeing who has opened or printed a document is at the heart of compliance and due diligence. For corporate bodies, being able to say if a document has been used or not and if so, by which authorized users, and when this took place, is critical to demonstrating that the document has been seen by the recipient and not just delivered.
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Track & Control PDF Documents
- Track document views and prints
- Stop unauthorized access and sharing
- Control use – stop copying, editing, printing, etc.
- Lock PDFs to devices, countries, locations
Tracking Documents & Controlling use with Safeguard PDF security
To track a document
In Safeguard Secure PDF Writer, go to the Printing & Viewing tab:
- To track document views, check the box ‘log document views’
- To track document prints (if you have allowed printing), check the box ‘log print requests’
Document Tracking Software
Using Enterprise PDF DRM Security you can track documents and monitor use.
- See what users are opening your documents
- See where they are being used and how often they are being viewed
- See when they are being viewed and printed
- Track print usage – how many prints, when and from where
- Track documents regardless of where they are stored or who they are sent to
- Apply location locking controls if documents are being opened from unauthorized locations
- Instantly revoke documents if you think they are being misused
Tracking documents has never been easier.
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Why Safeguard to Track Documents? |
Safeguard to track documents vs Document Tracking applications
As well as tracking document use, Safeguard PDF Security enables you to:
- Prevent users saving to other file formats to remove tracking controls
- Stops users sharing PDF documents and editing, copying and pasting content
- Disable printing (another easy way to remove tracking, especially if users can print to PDF files)
- Lock PDF documents to specific devices and locations
- Make PDFs expire on a specific date, after a number of opens or prints, or after a number of days from opening
- Stop screen grabbing applications and Windows print screen from taking screenshots
- Watermark viewed and printed pages with dynamic user and system data
- Revoke documents at any time if you think they are being misused
Safeguard PDF security is much more than a document tracking solution – it enforces tracking controls and enables you to distribute and/or sell PDFs securely and control their use regardless of their location.
Tracking overall use
Tracking document views
Tracking document prints
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Control & track document use with DRM document protection |
Track Document Use
There is little that is so exciting as the subject of document tracking. If you think it’s about as interesting as watching paint dry, then you’re wrong, and there it is.
Ever since the supermarkets discovered loyalty cards (pre-dates Google although they now do a splendid job tracking each and every web move that you make with them, and a rather large fortune selling that knowledge) knowing what users (aka consumers in some marketing thinking) are doing is valuable.
Just as a supermarket wants to know your buying habits and patterns so that they can punt to you things that you normally buy, they can also contrast your habits with similar people, see what else they bought, and see if it would appeal to you.
Now this can be good – you might like the other choices and it does save you the effort of thinking, or it can be bad if you blow this month’ s salary on crap it turns out you don’t either need or want.
But that is one side of document tracking. If a seller knows how often his books are read (actually, opened, so it can be misleading, ‘cos how often have I opened a recipe book and then ignored it?) then he ‘knows’ how to target the kinds of books you might be interested in.
(It crosses my mind that this document tracking stuff may not work quite so well when I am reading War and Peace [Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky damn it], which, even if you don’t put it down, and you would have to be seriously strong if you didn’t, it is not a 5 minute wonder, but a most of this month epic.)
But document tracking for commercial purposes, whilst it mimics the supermarket tracking and web analysis of the search engines, is probably at a lower level than the element of document control and document tracking that the corporate enterprise would find useful.
Enterprise Document Tracking
Now for the enterprise, document control is an essential. Far too many internal documents contain information that is subject to this or that regulatory control, or is a secret that you seriously do not wish to find on a download site (just look at the US government and the Wikileaks fiasco where huge numbers of supposedly confidential documents ended up on the Internet, to see exactly what I mean about failure to implement document tracking and document control in any useful way). Too little too late is their mantra.
For the corporate, document tracking – who exactly was authorized to see this, when (if ever) was it opened, can be amazingly useful information, especially once you understand that electronic evidence can be just as good as any other kind.
Imagine that, after some cock-up or other, someone is asked – did you see the instructions concerning the security of this document? Be very careful, because with document tracking they can show that the document was at least opened, so they are entitled to come to the conclusion that it must either have been read or consciously ignored. This already happens with email, so extending it is no big deal.
So document tracking is suddenly valuable. And knowing which location it was opened at can be kind of interesting as well. If top secret documents are getting opened from someone’s home rather a lot, it might suggest that they take way too much work home and need some helpful counseling (if you know what I mean) or using DRM to stop documents working outside of an office location.
In the corporate world, document tracking is therefore seriously interesting from many perspectives. It complements document control. If you don’t have document control, then you don’t have anything at all.
Document Control & Tracking
Establishing document control is just the beginning of wisdom. If you cannot achieve document integrity – that the document delivered must be the document sent in both form and format (this is a piece of legal speak, and if you don’t understand immediately all the liability implications please feel free to talk to your own counsel because I do not offer legal advice) then you are building on sand, which, apparently the Bible indicates is not a good idea. (Just as well silicon is not just sand, I guess.)
What document tracking builds on top of document control is the ability to know when particular events (usually the opening of a document, but also the printing of a document) took place. What document tracking is not able to tell you is when someone stopped using a document. There are many reasons for this. On the Internet, if a computer dies on you (or just gets disconnected from the Internet) the protocol has no method of noticing. As a logging system (please do not try to say audit because almost no IT systems actually deliver audit, just logging) there are no messages that say, “I have recently died”, or, “This application is no longer talking”.
The for why is the horrifying amount of network traffic that would be generated if applications would create if they were continually confirming their existence – never mind the problems of managing it all.
It is correct to say that back in the punched card age (after all, computers are post steam age, are they not) there were protocols that detected if a terminal was connected to a mainframe or not. But they were abandoned when the Internet came along, for a free-wheeling approach where a ‘session’ stayed alive for a certain amount of time regardless of whether the connection was live or not. That was the price of resilience – not to get upset if the other half was not there for a while(!).
So as a result of history, document tracking can only tell you when events start, and not when they end. Can you imagine the amount of network traffic if document monitoring could tell you each page that had been read/viewed/passed over by a recipient? It is technically feasible, as are most things, but not technically wise or sound.
In conclusion to this little observation, document control is an absolute, a must. Without it, any document of any importance can be distributed anyhow, anywhere and anywhen. And regardless of what the music track fascists claim, that having access to something automatically grants you the authority to do anything you like, in the words of the song, “It ain’t necessarily so”. Following on from document control, document tracking can be and is a valuable tool in a wide number of circumstances. If you believe that it will deliver valuable marketing information it may prove informative. If you need to be able to ‘prove’ that internal users actually received and at least opened (or did not open) documents then document tracking is an invaluable tool in the administrative armoury.
Why document tracking needs DRM
Enforcing tracking controls with Digital Rights Management
Although there are many tracking solutions available, if a user can save the document to a different file format or print to PDF then the tracking is essentially useless since it can be easily bypassed. The same is true if users can copy and paste content into other applications.
It is often also impossible to establish who you are actually tracking. If users download a document then they can share it, and if they login to a web portal to view a document then they can share login credentials with others. IP data is usually unreliable since users frequently change their IP addresses or can share the same IP with multiple users via a VPN. Proxy services also enable users to mask their real IP.
By using document DRM to enforce tracking controls you can prevent users from saving to different file formats, disable printing, and prevent copy and paste. Most importantly is that you can lock documents to authorized machines or devices – for another user to view the document they must have access to the physical device. You can therefore be much more certain that tracking is being enforced and which user you are actually tracking.
Download Document Tracking & Control software
Track Document Views and Prints with Safeguard Enterprise
Download document tracking software with DRM controls that protects and controls documents published in PDF format.
Using US Government strength encryption (AES) and digital rights management controls to prevent unauthorized use and misuse of your documents, you control who views your documents, what they can do with them (copy, print, etc.) and when they can no longer be viewed (expire). Track when documents are opened and printed and when and where this occured. Revoke access instantly if you think documents are being misused.
See our customer testimonials or read our case studies to see why thousands of organizations use Locklizard PDF security to securely distribute their documents.
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