Document Rights Management on Android and iOS

I wrote earlier this week about the new Adobe Reader 10.1 release for Android and iOS.

One very significant feature in this release has not previously been available on a mobile platform. LiveCycle Rights Management, a staple part of Adobe Reader on Windows and OSX for a long time, is now available to Android and iOS users.

One of the key attractions of using Adobe’s rights management over other solutions is the fact that the authentication and decryption technologies are built into Adobe Reader. This solves one of the big issues surrounding rights management, that of supporting and maintaining the decryption technology inside and outside of your organisation. By adopting Adobe’s LiveCycle solution this is taken care of for you, with a worldwide installed base of over 600 million copies of Acrobat Reader, the distribution and maintenance of the reader is already taken care of by Adobe. Now that this has been extended to Android and Apple tablet devices it really does take DRM to the next level.

DRM technology is all about protecting documents on the move, and you don’t get more portable than a tablet device. The concept of DRM documents “phoning home” to request a user’s access rights fits the mobile device strategy like a glove. New mobile internet technology, available 24/7, now mean that the mobile devices are the perfect platform for distributing rights managed documents within and beyond an organisation.

So what is available from this first DRM compatible release? Adobe has pledged further development and enhancements are coming, but for now this first release seems to be very accomplished.

• The recently rebranded, Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) Rights Management (LiveCycle version 10) is supported by default. Users of LiveCycle version 9 will need to ensure that they have service pack 2 installed along with a specific quick fix (QF 2.126). The quick fix is available b y contacting Adobe support.
• This version supports username/password and anonymous authentication, other mechanisms, such as Kerberos, smartcard and SAML are currently being considered by Adobe for future releases.
• It supports 256 bit AES encryption, the highest level of encryption currently available in LiveCycle.
• This is the first release to feature DRM, so there are a few limitations that early adopters need to be aware of. Currently offline viewing of documents is not available and policies that include dynamic watermarks are not supported.

Try it for yourself

If you fancy giving it a spin on your Android or Apple device, I have created a trial user account on my LiveCycle demo server for demonstrating rights management on Android and Apple devices. Just go to the Apple app store or the Android Market and download the reader; then download the following file to your mobile device.

RM_Trial.pdf 

Username: trial

Password: password

For more information on LiveCycle Rights Management, take a look at my "Deep Dive" webcast recording here.