Access to a particular document can be limited to a certain group of users, and what various users can do with the document can also be restricted so that some, for example, can only read it, not edit it.

I wanted to apply DRM protection to both Microsoft Office documents and Adobe PDFs, but it turns out that our technology choices are limited for a somewhat complicated reason, so we will be starting a pilot of Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server.

Our first DRM goal is to protect our technical service manuals. A large portion of our revenue comes from servicing the equipment we sell to chip manufacturers, and revenue has taken a hit when other parties have managed to acquire our service manuals and then offered our customers discounted servicing of our equipment.

How do other parties gain access to our service manuals? Well, the equipment that we build and service typically resides within chip fabrication plants, and it's not unusual for our service-manual PDFs to be sitting open on a workstation in a fab. These workstations are accessible to many people, sometimes including employees of our competitors.

To make matters worse, the management of some fabs won't let our employees bring in their company-issued laptops, so they have to load the PDF manuals on the fab workstations via a USB device or a CD-ROM. That's not a clean operation, because there's always a chance that remnants of the document may reside in a temporary directory on the fab workstation. Worse, our technicians could forgetfully leave the CD-ROM behind or lose it, and in some cases, they might be tempted to sell it.