IP protection

[loloaqic]

How I use Visio is, that I will create single document .vsd files. Each has a
drawing page, along with 2 background pages. on the first background page is
my standard Footers that contain various Document text (filename, creation
dated, edited date, etc...) on the second background page is our company logo.

We provide these Visio diagrams to Customers, however what I would like to
know is how I can protect the content on the two background pages from being
manipulated.
As a secondry question how would I protect the entire document from
manipulation (apart from saving as a pdf of web page etc...)

 

[David Parker]

In the PageSheet of each Background page, change the UIVisibility cell to 1
.... This will hide these pages in the UI.
You will need to use code to set the values back to 0, if you want to see
them again.

If your drawing page does not contain shapes that you want to be selected,
then you could make it a Background page too, and have an empty Forground
page which has it as a Background. You could then hide the drawing page in
the same way.

Alternatively, you can make the shapes on the drawing page unselectable by
changing their Layer to Lock=True, or you can change the Format / Protection
of each shape, and depending on which choices you make, you can also use
Protect Document... from the right mouse menu of the Drawing Explorer
window.

You can also set Hidden = True for all Masters in the local document, thus
preventing idle copying..

Finally, you could change the file attributes to Read Only.

None of these methods is completely tamper proof....

 

[AlEdlund]

adding just a little to Davids comments, John Goldsmith put some material on
his blog relative to the code that David mentions.
http://visualsignals.typepad.co.uk/vislog/2008/02/hiding-pages-wi.html
al

 

[loloaqic]

David,
Many thanks for that response. There are suggestion in there I have never
even thought about or heard of, and I will certainly be researching them to
see if they provide enough of an obstacle to prevent the idle wannabe's from
tampering with my documents.

Given the complexity of your suggestion, and the reversal as mentioned in
Al's response, is this worth a suggestion to MS for inclusion in future
releases?
(not this solution particularly, rateher a simpler and safer method to
protect one's IP.)

 

[WapperDude]

If distributing the drawings as Visio docs isn't required, you could send out
as PDF.

Wapperdude