Labeling and Watermarking SharePoint Documents When Opened

Back in January I discussed Timestamping and Tracking SharePoint Documents. Organizations want to track what happens to their SharePoint documents when they are downloaded or opened because a lot of people are dealing with sensitive documents. In the first release of our Document Marking for SharePoint product we could help organizations watermark or timestamp SharePoint documents when they were first saved to SharePoint.  But this didn't help organizations that wanted to apply labels, watermarks or timestamps when a document was opened or downloaded.

I'm happy to say that we have added this feature in R2 of our Document Marking product which is now available. In this release you can specify that you want to add a header, footer or watermark when a document is opened (checked-out, downloaded) from a SharePoint document library.  The policy is applied at the library level and is applied to all PDF documents in the library.  Here is an example of an administrator defined policy for a library.  In this example we will be inserting the current user's name into the header and footer of the PDF, and we will be inserting a timestamp in the watermark.  This policy will be applied to all PDF documents in this Document Library:

 
(Click to get larger view) 

Here is an example of what a PDF document would look like once the policy has been applied.  In this case we are signed on as the Administrator, so that is the current user displayed in the header.  One thing to note is that the PDF copy the viewer sees contains the labels, but the original version in the SharePoint Document Library is not modified.  So if the organization ever decides to change the labels in the future, there will be no issues.

 

If you want to apply these types of labels to Microsoft Office documents rather than PDFs, you can use the Doucment Marking product in conjunction with our PDF Control solution to automatically convert Office documents to PDF in SharePoint.  This solution will allow you to retain all the Office documents in their original source, but SharePoint users will see the PDF version of the document.