Document Sharing with Copy Protection

Below case study was prepared based on experience working with our customer requirements and how NirvaShare solved their  problems related to file sharing and collaboration by making use of its feature called Document sharing with copy protection

Problem Statement

A customer of ours, an educational institute had a use case where they needed to share specific course material to students who have enrolled in their courses and also certain general study material that are available to aspiring students who haven’t enrolled in their courses yet. Following were the business requirements

  • The course material shared to students should not be content copyable or distributable.
  • Students having access to existing WordPress based learning systems, should be able to do a Single Sign On to study materials too.
  • Non registered students should be able to access the materials using any valid email id.
  • Administrators should get email notification when study materials are accessed with details such as student email, time, document accessed, IP address, etc.
  • Everything should be audited for later compliance needs.

Solution

NirvaShare has a feature called document Copy Protect that enables a user to only view files and not copy or download them. Using the document sharing with copy protection feature,  the problem of documents getting copied or distributed was avoided. This feature is available for file types like pdf, word, excel, ppt and text formats. Furthermore NirvaShare also provides custom text watermarks which appear on each page of the file when accessed by a user.

documentsharingwithcopyprotection
watermark

For enrolled students performing Single Sign On with WordPress, NirvaShare has the capability to hook with any external user store and in this case it was wordpress users. Using SAML based plugin, it was possible to integrate with NirvaShare, thereby users accessing documents were automatically signed in with their WordPress session.

NirvaShare provides many types of authentications and one of the types is OTP based authentication, where the Admin can configure email ids pattern to let OTP based authentication with a valid email id. Here, the institute allows all the non-enrolled students with a valid email id to access the general study material available to them by authenticating using the OTP sent to their valid email id that was used to access that particular study material.

otp

For notification, NirvaShare allows Admin to configure one or more email id to notify when documents are accessed. With this, administrators can be notified through emails when a student views any of the study material.

NirvaShare also audits all the actions of the users, which can be later used for compliance purposes and Admin can monitor and keep track of the activities of their users. Audit data is also searchable and a report can be generated.

Files were stored in MinIO S3 compatible storage.

Further References

For further information on how and where to install NirvaShare and its document sharing with copy protection feature, please check our blogs for options across cloud vendors. CLICK HERE