Assembling Secured Documents

Industry: Public Sector

Solutions: Document Security, Document Generation

Features: PDF Assembly, Digital signature validation and Document Certification

Ensuring consistent formatting and layout of critical government documents from numerous departments while applying digital security measures to prevent tampering or unauthorized changes.

4Point developed an Adobe Experience Manager Forms solution to gather, merge, and format documents from various departments into a single PDF document with consistent appearance and branding. Digital security certificates were applied to authenticate the document's origin and integrity.

Government documents are securely assembled and distributed, ensuring they are viewed only through Adobe Acrobat Reader to maintain presentation and allow for viewing and retention rules, while digital signatures certify authenticity and prevent tampering.

Story

A government agency is responsible for the assembly, generation, and distribution of critical government documents from over 180 departments. The government agency needs to ensure that the documents as distributed are consistent in format and layout. In addition, the government agency needs to apply digital security to the document so that citizens can be assured that the document they receive from the government agency is the official version of the document and can also be assured that the document they are viewing has not been tampered with.

4Point designed, developed, and deployed an Adobe Experience Manager Forms solution for the government agency that allows the government agency to gather documents from a range of departments and agencies. These documents can be received in a variety of formats including Word, Excel and PDF. The 4Point solution gathers these documents according to the processing rules and workflow as defined by the government agency for each department. Then the 4Point built Adobe Experience Manager Forms solution merges all the documents into a single PDF document and applies layout and formatting rules that ensure a consistent appearance and appropriate department or agency branding.

The documents generated through this process are marked in such a manner as to only be readable from within Adobe Acrobat Reader (free or professional versions). This ensures that the presentation of the information is maintained and avoids issues with legacy browsers or browsers that provide poor support for PDF features.

This requirement, that the document must be viewed from within Acrobat Reader, also allows the government agency to apply viewing and retention rules. For example, a document can be marked as “expired” and once that is done then no one will be permitted to open it and they will be directed to the most up-to-date version. This helps to ensure that citizens are always reading the most up-to-date version of the government publications.

Finally, and perhaps the most important element, the solution applies a digital security certificate to the document. This digital signature uses the certification of the government agency as a federal agency and provides a series of benefits to the documents: It allows the reader or recipient of the document to validate that this document was produced by the government agency and is the official version. It allows the reader or recipient to verify that the document has not been changed or tampered with between its generation by the government agency and is delivery to the recipient.