Seamlessly storing and managing documents protected with LiveCycle ES

Additional Requirements

LiveCycle Rights Management ES

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LiveCycle Content Services ES

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Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader

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LiveCycle Rights Management ES and LiveCycle Content Services ES provide a way for organizations to seamlessly store and manage protected documents.

On its own, LiveCycle Rights Management ES enables you to enforce user access and usage rights based on dynamic information policies that map to key business and governance objectives. It's great at seamlessly protecting documents, making sure that only the right people have access to the right documents at the right point in time. In fact, Adobe has worked hard to ensure that users who interact with protected documents can perform their daily work without interference from the added security.

LiveCycle Content Services ES lets you rapidly build content-rich engagement applications with a low total cost of ownership. When you combine these solutions, you have a fully integrated set of secure content services, including an enterprise content repository that can transparently protect managed content, even when users interact with documents outside of the repository on their desktops or on the web.

These two products together ensure you can manage content in a lower-cost extensible way for cross-company and cross-organizational processes.

Automatically protecting content in LiveCycle Content Services ES

Each space within LiveCycle Content Services ES can be seen as a folder that holds sub-spaces or content. These spaces can be associated with business rules and security–including various access control rights as defined by LiveCycle Rights Management ES. After this is done once, users need not worry about the details of security. Why? Because there is no need to perform an extra step to protect documents. Instead, adding security is a breeze because the act of adding content can automatically trigger its protection with LiveCycle Rights Management ES.

For example, an administrator can create a trigger (known as a Rule in LiveCycle Content Services ES) to associate the Confidential policy for general documents, or the Mergers & Acquisitions policy for content being stored for the M&A team.

Once the administrator sets up one of these triggers, LiveCycle Content Services ES enables business users to interact with the space in many ways, including via the Web UI, FTP, CIFS, or WebDAV. This means that users can map one of their network drives on their Windows machine to a space in repository. That way users can interact with their mapped drive (for example "Z:\Shared Documents\") and feel confident that files stored there are protected even if people copy those documents to a USB drive or post them on a web site. It also means that users can interact with a rich web user interface to manage these documents. If they prefer, they can also take advantage of other sharing protocols.

To illustrate how this works, I have created a demonstration in which an administrator creates a rule to automatically protect all content with a predefined policy, and a business user uploads a document to be automatically protected.

Watch the demonstration.

Using smart policies and the ContentServicesPolicy

Another way LiveCycle ES can make interaction seamless is through the use of smart policies. This functionality is based upon a set of developer SDKs that Adobe makes available to all customers for integration into other content management repositories.

With smart policies, you don't have to worry about defining access rules multiple times. LiveCycle Rights Management ES inspects existing access rules on spaces within the LiveCycle Content Services ES repository, and determines who can access content and who cannot based on those rules. ContentServicesPolicy is a smart policy that automatically grants access to users who are entitled to view a particular space.

For example, consider a situation in which Jonathan has access to the M&A space within the repository and copies a protected document out (intentionally or unintentionally). Jonathan then forwards it on to Donald, who does not have access to the M&A space. Donald will be prevented from opening it on his desktop because the protection mechanism determines that he's not entitled to the document, even if he gets his hands on it!

To illustrate this capability, I have recorded a demonstration that shows how users can interact with documents via a shared network drive, and how smart policies seamlessly protect managed content.

Watch the demonstration.

Where to go from here

I hope that this introduction to some of the joint LiveCycle Rights Management ES and LiveCycle Content Services ES capabilities will help you better understand how easy it can be for users to interact with protected content.

You can use the resources below to find more information on these topics:

• LiveCycle Rights Management ES Blog with recent product updates, demos, and customer stories
• LiveCycle Rights Management ES product site
• LiveCycle Content Services ES product site
• Information assurance page of the LiveCycle Developer Center