Hi Cheryl!

Adding a copyright watermark and locking your PDFs with a password will help prevent your documents being copied professionally, but beyond that, sharing among your learners is pretty hard to avoid if they really want to share something. (Where there’s a will there’s a way)

Is there a way for you to make your documents unique/valuable to a point that everyone would want to get the official version rather than share a PDF?

Also, without additional specific information, the only other suggestion I could offer would be to make getting documents from you the absolute easiest way to get the documents. Removing any hurdles and roadblocks would encourage people to go to you, rather than go to a colleague for the documents.

Hope this helps!

-Dahveed

Thank you, Dahveed!  Appreciate the feedback. Watermarking is what we’ll do for now, but also looking at DRMs and how we can potentially integrate.

We use the Docebo Coach and Share feature, which enables the use of Channels, to share assets like documents or videos that we want users to see and learn from, but not download. When you post a document or video to a Channel, you have the option to check or uncheck “Allow user to download”. Not sure if that helps in your scenario though. It is indeed a challenge to police and attempt to prevent anyone from sharing a file once it is downloaded from anywhere.

Yup, I was coming to mention what @MarkMBT said, Coach and Share will give you the choice.  I guess my question is if someone can print, what stops them from just walking away with the item, scanning it back in and doing whatever they want with a program like Adobe that allows you to edit a PDF? I work in the Financial Industry so I do understand data integrity and securing but just wondering if what you have already done could be enough? Because like someone mentioned above, where there is a will there is a way.

Thank you Mark and Stephanie.  I agree with your comments - sharing is not something we can eliminate entirely - not even with printed books.  Your feedback is especially valuable to me because I can share it with others in our organization who have not yet come to this realization. :)