Acrobat 9 Family of Products
Getting Started
Security Feature User Guide
How Should You Use This Guide? 9
1.3 How Should You Use This Guide?
If you are setting up a signature workflow for the first time, do not have a digital ID, or have not established
some sort of trust for other signer’s whose signature you need to validate, read
Chapter 2, “Getting and
Using Your Digital ID”
and
Chapter 3, “Managing Certificate Trust and Trusted Identities”
. In enterprise
settings, the administrator may issue you an ID (or provide instructions on getting one) and may also set
up your application so that it can verify (trust) signatures.
Authoring
: If you are a document author or manage document templates that contain signature fields,
read
Chapter 4, “Authoring Signable Documents”
.
Signing
: If you will be signing documents, configure your application and learn about the signature
types and signing process as described in
Chapter 6, “Signing Documents”
.
Validating Signatures
: If you will be validating signatures in signed documents, configure your
application and learn about what controls signature status as described in
Chapter 7, “Validating
Signatures”
. If you have not previously configured a trust anchor, you may also want to read
Chapter 3,
“Managing Certificate Trust and Trusted Identities”
.
Configuring machines
: If you are concerned about securing the application environment and
controlling document and application access to external content such as the Internet and attachments,
see
Chapter 9, “External Content and Document Security”
.
Sharing application settings
: If you need to share your certificate or server settings with someone,
see
Chapter 10, “Security Setting Import and Export”
.
1.4 Roadmap to Other Security Documentation
In many enterprise environments, there is no clear distinction between audience types. Some end users
are “power users” and don’t shy away from modifying the registry and tweaking applications in
administrator-like ways. Some system administrators are highly technical and perform developer-like tasks
such as PERL programming and JavaScript scripting. For this reason, it is up to the reader to determine
what documents listed in
Table 1
are pertinent to their tasks. However, this document uses the following
definitions:
User or end user
: End users usually have their application installed and preconfigured by an
administrator. They only interact with the graphical user interface and do not modify the registry. Some
end users, such as document authors, may use simple JavaScripts to set seed values on documents.
Administrator
: System administrators install and configure end user machines. More often than not,
they use the installer wizard to configure the product installer prior to deploying applications across
the enterprise. Because the end user experience can be controlled by the registry, administrators must
be familiar with both the application’s user interface and capabilities as well as the options for registry
configuration.
Developer
: Developers typically try to find programmatic ways to generate or process PDF documents.
They read specifications and API documents to figure out how to solve real-world enterprise problems
without requiring manual human intervention. Communication with servers is often a requirement.
Because enterprise solutions often involve understanding application behavior, developers sometimes
need to review administration guides to learn how to deploy plugins or handlers and to learn how to
configure the application to use those components. Many of the application’s registry settings can be
accessed and manipulated via JavaScript.