Archive for January, 2009
Jumping through Hoops: The Pain Installers Cause….
For those of us who build software, creating a new software product is usually fun and exciting. There are new challenges, the opportunity to use new tools and techniques, and there is a special thrill of seeing something work for the first time. But unless you have the luxury of building software solely for your own entertainment, once you’ve got that great new product built, you have to figure out how to get it to your customers. At Vitrium, much of the software that we build is web-based, so the issue of delivering software to our users is really just one of ensuring browser compatibility.
But if you work at a company that delivers software for the desktop, you typically have to build an installer — a second piece of software whose job is to get your actual software successfully running on the users’ machines. There is no joy in writing in installers. I’ve worked at companies where we had to build installers for our software, and it’s amazing how much time and effort was required to build and maintain them.
The reason for that is that the installer is a piece of software whose primary responsibility is to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the millions of computers out there. Different operating systems, different utilities, firewalls, proxy servers, pieces of software that have been removed or modified by the user — the list goes on. These are all things that could potentially cause your software not to work on a given computer. So the installer has to identify and, where possible, resolve these problems. And no matter how hard you try, there will always be a steady stream of issues that come up: combinations of software that the installer doesn’t handle, configurations that have never been seen before, software versions that behave in subtly different ways, even gracefully handling upgrading from previous versions of your own software.
That’s why, at Vitrium, it has always been our goal to produce software that doesn’t need installers. Our applications are delivered over the web. The PDF’s produced by our products use standard Adobe software that already exists on almost every computer on the planet. The result is that we have essentially no support costs related to getting our products onto people’s computers. And that is good for us, and for our customers.
World’s Easiest SaaS DRM Solution for PDF Protection
Vitrium has made significant traction in the digital rights management (DRM) space with protectedpdf and the benefits of its new SaaS version are clear. Cadalyst Magazine’s Kenneth Wong had the opportunity to preview SBE at the Adobe Max Show in San Francisco last November and immediately marveled about not needing to own or install any software. “You implement the security features you want — disabling printing and copying , for example — by uploading your file to the protectedpdf portal, specifying the rights you want to grant, then downloading the tagged file back to your own local drive,” he explains.
Perhaps the coolest feature, “you can modify or revoke the rights previously granted after the document has been published and distributed,” notes Wong. SBE features include: auto-unlock files; modify and revoke reader permissions; limit the number of computers a reader may access documents from; disable text copying and document printing; display customized system data when printed or displayed onscreen; and even protect multiple PDFs simultaneously or automate the protection process.
This DRM solution is a SaaS offering built on the Microsoft SharePoint platform is great news for all Microsoft SharePoint users who have PDF’s they would like to protect from unauthorized redistribution.
