Monitoring Document Usage – See Which Users Use Your Documents, Where and When

Like every business, yours likely has various types of documents, including research reports, agreements, company policies and results, and eBooks for sale. All such documents need to be accessed only by those people to whom you provide authorized access.

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But, what if an authorized user starts forwarding your PDF files to unauthorized users? To restrict or prevent such unauthorized access to your documents, you first need to start monitoring the authorized users’ use appropriately. Only then will you be in a position to exercise control over document usage.

Mind you, this is not the only reason why you need to track PDF usage. In terms of documents that you sell, you also need to generate a marketing analysis report that indicates which eBooks or files are the most popular and how many different users open them, instead of just one user accessing them multiple times.

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Digital Rights Management (DRM) security for your PDF files will ensure appropriate marketing analysis as well as accurate tracking and monitoring of PDF document usage. When we say “accurate” monitoring, we mean it tracks the usage from the user level and even at the device level. Imagine a situation where any of your authorized users accesses a PDF document from multiple devices; do you know if the person accessing your document is the same authorized user or someone else?

With PDF DRM, you can track who is opening or viewing your document as well as from which location and device. For example, you do not want a highly sensitive document to be opened many times from someone’s home. DRM even enables you to restrict the use of specific documents to specific devices. And, with an enterprise PDF DRM security solution, you can instantly revoke a particular user’s access to documents, if you detect access from a strange location.

Yet, you also need to ensure that your documents are encrypted while being transferred. A DRM solution works perfectly well in combination with encryption technology used for any type of PDF file. The use of the decryption key by your document recipients further helps you accurately track document usage.

And, tracking file usage does not just involve noting the action of “opening” or “viewing”. Certain users may print copies of the documents as per the access rights assigned to them (i.e. if you allow printing). So, it is extremely important to track which users are printing your documents and how many times they do so.

As stated earlier, accurate document tracking and monitoring helps with document copy protection and helps you understand their popularity. For example, on the basis of the marketing analysis of an eBook, your enterprise can decide the topic for the next eBook. In this way, you can provide your audience with the content that is in demand and trending.

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We hope that the above information about using PDF DRM security for consistent monitoring of document usage proves valuable to you.