Among the different content protection and digital rights management technologies in the market today, very few function without the need for users to download 3rd party proprietary applications or plug-ins to access protected content. Since 2005, Vitrium has been one of the premier DRM providers focused on providing plug-in free access to content and, in 2012, introduced a more modern web viewer technology to its customers that allow their authorized users instant access to their content on any browser or device, without the need for messy and hassle-ridden external apps or plug-ins. It’s this balance between protecting an organization’s valuable intellectual property and providing seamless access for their users, that keeps organizations coming back to Vitrium.
While Vitrium does offer two different encryption methods for protecting content, it is the Vitrium Web Viewer that has quickly become the format of choice for most organizations today.
Content uploaded to Vitrium will be automatically protected and converted into two encrypted formats:
Bookmarking your content and creating a table of contents allows users to easily navigate through the document and locate specific sections, which is especially useful in long documents.
Users can easily navigate through the document using the Page-Up and Page-Down buttons or go directly to a specific page.
These features are particularly beneficial to those who need to interact with the content, such as students and researchers marking-up the important parts of the documents and adding comments and notes as they would with physical textbooks or papers. Vitrium’s annotations and highlighting features are saved with the document so no matter what device a user accesses their content on, they will be able to see the same annotations and highlights on all devices!
Users can insert shapes like circles, rectangles and squares or use the pen tool to write or draw free-hand whatever shapes they want to. Ink color and pen size are also customizable to the user’s desire.
Users who need to add comments to different parts of the content, especially long notes, will surely benefit from the Note tool. It is displayed as a call-out icon in the content that expands upon clicking, and is fully movable and editable.
Users can add text directly on the document to fill in forms, questionnaires, or quizzes, for example, or to simply add a note directly on the page instead of using the Note tool above.
With the highlighting tool, users can highlight selected text or freely drag the mouse over any part of the page they wish to highlight. The user can also choose from different highlight colors.
Vitrium’s web viewer technology provides content owners with granular DRM controls. As a content owner, you can decide whether to show users the annotations feature or not. You can also set printing controls and if you allow the user to print, they can also print out the Text, Highlights, Drawing and Shapes that they have created. Notes/Comments currently cannot be printed.
As mentioned above, one of the key controls of a digital rights management (DRM) solution like Vitrium is whether to allow printing or not. Vitrium will always strongly advise customers NOT to allow printing as you give up some measure of control over your content and your intellectual property since many browser have a “save-to-PDF” option or users can simply make more copies of the content once printed or they can scan the file back in as an unprotected PDF. However, if you do allow printing, you can set a print limit of how many copies one can print. Vitrium also strongly advises adding your organization’s copyright protection disclaimer as a watermark, as well as adding other dynamic watermarks on the content with user-identifying information. Refer to Overview of Vitrium’s Digital Watermarks for more information about Vitrium’s extensive watermarking capabilities.
Document and image files converted into Vitrium’s Web Viewer can also be accessible offline (if this is allowed in the corresponding DRM policy). Authorized users will need Internet connectivity for the first time they unlock or access protected content via the web viewer; however, after the first unlock, they can save the document or image to their browser’s cache (or memory) by clicking the “Save-to-Browser” button in the web viewer. The web viewer’s offline access feature allows authorized users to access their content if they are: