Canon partners with Adobe on secure printing

Canon has announced a new partnership with Adobe, which lets it include PDF technology directly into its new range of business printers.

The agreement, which builds on an alliance first established in 2005, makes Adobe's LiveCycle Rights Management ES software available directly from the control panel of the new imageRunner Advanced series printers.

This means that users can send documents to an Adobe rights management policy server, which can securely share documents on a network, but prevent them from being printed or amended, depending on the policy setup.

Paul Rowntree, Canon's European marketing manager told IT PRO that this feature, in combination with card based authentication, brought of whole new level of security and efficiency to enterprise printing.

"We're now seeing the need for print on demand. It prevents a pile of papers on the printer of pages that have either been forgotten about or that contain sensitive data," he said.

Alternatively, users can also now share documents using Microsoft SharePoint services direct from the printer's control panel. The Adobe agreement also covers support for PostScript 3 printing.

Rowntree also demonstrated Canon's updated iw360 software. This enables users to mix and match documents in different file formats and combine them into a new document for printing, just by dragging and dropping files.

"It's simple software that sits on users laptops that can really enhance productivity," he said.