Nuance and Appligent Team Strengthens PDF Security

Nuance and Appligent Team to Strengthen PDF Document Security for Legal, Intelligence and Homeland Security Markets.
PDF Converter Professional Now Includes Industry-Leading PDF Redaction from Appligent; Nuance Also to Offer Appligent Redax & StampPDF Plug-In Solutions

Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, and Appligent Inc., a leading supplier of redaction and manipulation solutions for PDF, today announced a collaboration that significantly strengthens content security when sharing PDF documents, which is especially valuable for users in legal, intelligence and homeland security organizations. Under the agreement, Nuance has embedded Appligent redaction capabilities within PDF Converter Professional 4, the best-selling alternative to Adobe® Acrobat®, and will offer an expanded set of capabilities to the product through the Appligent Redax & Stamp add-on solution, also to be sold by Nuance.

Redaction, or the selective and permanent removal of information from a document, has been a mainstay of legal,
intelligence, defense and security organizations for decades. While documents have traditionally been redacted as paper, with sections of text blotted out with the use of a black marker, more recently organizations have looked to PDF to more easily share their redacted documents. And while PDF makes it easy to share same-as-paper documents online, the format can also make it easy to mistakenly leave redacted text in a PDF document, even if it is not readable on the screen.

"PDF has made it easier to share 'same as paper' documents, but it also has increased the risk of releasing sensitive information, ranging from financial, legal and government data, to employee records and personnel details," said Robert Weideman, general manager and senior vice president, Productivity Applications, Nuance. "Our alliance with Appligent puts PDF redaction at everyone's fingertips, delivering technology that has been proven to work within leading legal, military and intelligence organizations."

The need for effective redaction capabilities for PDF documents has been recently highlighted by a series of high-profile cases where sensitive information was inadvertently left in the PDF file by corporate, government and military agencies using the Internet and PDF to more broadly share redacted documents. In one example, reported by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the United States military unknowingly revealed information about the procedures and soldiers involved in an incident at a US military checkpoint in Iraq, which resulted in the death of Italian secret agent Nicola Calipari.

The military report, published in PDF format, had apparently been blacked-out using highlighting tools within a word processor before being converted into PDF. Within a few short hours after being posted on an official military web site, readers discovered that while the PDF text was blacked-out on the screen, it could easily be uncovered using a simple cut and paste from Adobe® Reader® into a text editing or word processing software.

PDF Converter Professional 4 now includes Appligent Redax Lite, which integrates precise redaction into the highlight, strikethrough and underline annotation tools of the application. Users can now easily prepare a document for redaction using familiar tools, share the document with others for confirmation, and then instantly redact selected portions. The product creates a duplicate copy of the original PDF, but with all traces of redacted text safely and securely removed from the new PDF copy.

The new Appligent Redax & Stamp 4, a $79 plug-in for PDF Converter Professional to be sold by Nuance, combines even more powerful redaction and security features with valuable document stamping and tracking features. The enhanced feature set delivered in the plug-in include:

Text and Zone Redaction - Removes text as well as pictures, tables, charts and zones within a PDF

Batch Redaction - Removes targeted words or phrases using an external list, which is especially valuable when redacting a set of PDF documents, or standardizing redaction across many workers

Template Redaction - Redaction using single or multi-page templates

Bracketed Text Redaction - Many law firms previously marked areas for redaction in Word and WordPerfect files with square brackets. The text between brackets was then turned to white, which is not secure. Redax will automatically redact the content that is between square brackets

Exemption Codes - Used to insert reason codes for redactions made in a document, includes built-in exemption codes for the United States Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act

Automatically Removes Document MetaData

Bates Stamping - Used by legal and business to date and sequentially number documents as they are received and processed
Permanent Stamping - Ability to add arbitrary new text to an existing PDF, which then becomes a permanent part of the PDF document

Customized Stamps - The appearance and position of stamps are customizable for color, font, style, size, location

Page Numbering - Enables users to assemble pages from multiple sources and create new page numbering for the newly compiled PDF document

Invisible Stamping - Allow for the addition of text information that is invisible to the naked eye, but visible to search tools and engines

"The alliance between Appligent and Nuance provides organizations with an even more compelling alternative when it comes to professional-grade PDF applications," said Virginia Gavin, CEO of Appligent. "We are proud to join with Nuance in enabling the best possible PDF solutions for legal, government and corporate users."

In just three years Nuance has become the clear alternative to Adobe for desktop PDF applications, selling more than one million seats of its "Better PDF for Business" solutions to individuals and organizations worldwide. PDF Converter Professional from Nuance has won accolades for the technical quality of its PDF implementation, providing organizations such as Credit Suisse Information Technology, Dell, The Gillette Company, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, The National Institute of Health, Volkswagen, and Wells Fargo with an affordable and 100% industry-standard PDF solution - Nuance.