Improving your business processes with watermarks

Learn about all of the document enhancements that Adlib can automate

I’d like to change things up a bit and start this post with a hypothetical situation: what if document watermarks didn’t exist? What would the business world look like? Let’s take a peek.

• A lawyer working on an important acquisitions contract leaves a draft on her assistant’s desk for review. The assistant thinks the contract is final and sends it to the receiving party.
• An engineer in a medical device manufacturing facility prints off a schematic which is supposed to expire in 5 days. 7 days later a tech picks up the schematic and thinks it’s still valid.
• An insurance provider is compiling some strictly confidential documents for a hearing, and uploads the package to her content management system. The file is downloaded and read by someone in her department because they think the information is public.
• A government employee is working on a press release which is not to be released externally. The final document gets filed in the media library, and is accidentally sent out to national newspapers.

The list can go on and on, but you get the picture. All of those situations could have been greatly improved if there were watermarks on those documents. Of course these are exaggerations, but I’m sure you’ve been in a similar situation where a watermark could have solved a huge misunderstanding.

Using watermarks to streamline document processes

Luckily we don’t need to live in a world without watermarks. The world we live in has watermarks, and not only that, these watermarks can be automated using the metadata tags on your documents.

When you enter your documents into your content repository or ECM, you can assign metadata which includes things like the document status (draft, final), privacy settings (confidential, public) and validity or date stamps (this document expires after 5 days), in addition to a number of other attributes. Adlib can then leverage that metadata and automatically add watermarks to your converted PDF documents. Organizations can set up rules so that the watermark is always present when certain metadata is entered, allowing the knowledge workers to get back to work and not worry that their document process will lead them into trouble.

See how much difference a simple watermark can make? Read more about the other enhancements that can be automated with Adlib PDF in this blog post.