TechVirtuoso

Canon told the press today that they will be extending the partnership with Adobe with a new software agreement designed to boost security and usability of the company’s products.

Canon and Adobe formed said partnership back in 2005 for various projects, with the printing giant now planning to offer integration with the Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES system into all of its new imageRunner Advance series of products, allowing users to apply security policies to scanned documents on the fly.

Canon’s European marketing manager, Paul Rowntree, gave a demonstration of how the system works, and showed how certain policies will do things such as prevent unauthorised users printing a certain document.

“This type of security is unique to Canon and shows how our printers fit with a secure document management system,” Rowntree said.

Users will also be able to assemble documents with material from multiple sources using easy drag-and-drop functionality, according to the firm. Now that Canon holds a niche feature set with combined document security and compilation software, it will be interesting to see if this helps them recover from the economic struggles of the first two quarters of this year.