Hosted service promises to protect corporate documents on smartphones

Encrypted Flash reader from WatchDox enables but controls sharing

A hosted application for securing shared corporate documents is being extended to handheld devices. With WatchDox, mobile users can view and even selected documents, but be prevented from saving, printing, or forwarding them, if desired.

Android 2.2: How to install Flash on Froyo

Later this year, WatchDox will be supported on BlackBerry OS, webOS, and Symbian, as these add support for Adobe's mobile Flash player, Flash 10.1. WatchDox uses a special version of the Flash player to display protected documents. Also in the works: a native application for Apple's iOS, used in iPhone, iPad and the new iPod touch, none of which support Flash. A prototype is already being tested, according to company officials.

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A hosted application for securing shared corporate documents is being extended to handheld devices. With WatchDox, mobile users can view and even selected documents, but be prevented from saving, printing, or forwarding them, if desired.

Android 2.2: How to install Flash on Froyo

Later this year, WatchDox will be supported on BlackBerry OS, webOS, and Symbian, as these add support for Adobe's mobile Flash player, Flash 10.1. WatchDox uses a special version of the Flash player to display protected documents. Also in the works: a native application for Apple's iOS, used in iPhone, iPad and the new iPod touch, none of which support Flash. A prototype is already being tested, according to company officials.

The first mobile users for WatchDox will be those running Android 2.2, the Froyo release, which was the first platform to incorporate Flash 10.1 support. WatchDox vendor, Confidela, recently announced WatchDox for Android 2.2.

The core WatchDox product, launched in early 2009, is a hosted solution (though it's also available as a standard server-based application behind the corporate firewall). No software has to be installed on the client. Support for mobile operating systems will give such users access to protected documents anywhere and anytime they can get a cellular (or Wi-Fi) signal. IT administrators can use their phones to set manage, configure and track WatchDox documents.

One user is TrimTabs, a Sausalito, Calif., financial investment research company. In the past, the company sent about 40 to 50 reports each month to several hundred subscribers via e-mail, as .pdf attachments. TrimTabs wanted to track who was actually reading the reports, eventually let them be read easily by BlackBerry and iPhone users, and possibly in the future add higher levels of security, says Jerry Vigil, TrimTabs' database architect.

"It was pretty easy to deploy, especially compared to the other systems we looked at," he says. TrimTabs was using the WatchDox plugin for Microsoft Outlook (another is available for Gmail) to automatically protect e-mail attachments. Currently, TrimTabs exports tracking data WatchDox collects to a separate reporting application: for future releases, Vigil hopes to see more sophisticated and flexible reporting features in the Confidela software.

Other products and frameworks that address some of these same issues include Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, FileOpen, LockLizard, EMC's Documentum, and Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services.

In the hosted WatchDox version, a company selects what documents it wants to protect, checks off the desired permissions or restrictions for each document, and uploads the documents to Confidela's servers. There, the documents are converted into one of two formats, one for online Internet access by end users, the other for downloading the document which can only be viewed with Confidela's plug-in reader.

The online option is based on an encrypted version of Adobe Flash, developed by Confidela. In this case, "the document never leaves our servers," says Adi Ruppin, vice president of marketing for Confidela. "And it's not being cached locally on the browser."