Adobe Systems is advancing security for electronic documents with the recent release of their Adobe Acrobat product family and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). New Acrobat 6.0 features an expanded document control, which should help enterprises manage privacy and intellectual property by protecting the confidentiality of documents and electronic forms. Besides the standard password protection schemes, users now have the ability to encrypt a document using both Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

Acrobat 6.0 now includes native support for most popular Certificate Authorities and hardware tokens through the Microsoft CryptoAPI on Windows. For providing a higher lever of security to its users, Adobe is actively working with couple of security companies, such as Entrust and Verisign. Through these partnerships, Adobe's comprehensive document security solutions can be integrated with enterprise infrastructures.


"Organizations need to assign a higher priority to ensuring the integrity of sensitive documents by incorporating stronger document control mechanisms such as digital signing. Additionally, electronic documents that contain sensitive information, especially protected personal privacy information, must only be accessed by authorized persons. With the increasingly punitive nature of the rising regulatory environment, failure to meet these needs can have significant consequences." said Charles Kolodgy, research director at IDC.