Secure Bid Documents

[rm_beard_ccs]

Is the former recommendation that all Bid/Contract documents be secure to prevent alterations by unauthorized sources still the prevailing recommendation within the specifications industry?

Recently, a GC complained that their Procure software program was blocking searches of our secure Project Manual. Our secure Project Manual does permit printing, copying or extracting, and extractions for accessibility are currently in affect and available to all users. Does anyone know of a feature within Procure that will permit Procure to perform a document wide search of a secured PDF file? Or, is there a specific feature within PDF platforms that permit searches of secure PDF files?

[Phil_Kabza]

Ron: This may be somewhat off-topic but possibly related to your issue. Changes to MSWord have caused the MasterSpec Masterworks bulk PDF utility to default to PDF/a output, a secure output, if you are saving to anything but the standard MWorks Generated folder in the root C drive. Deltek Support pointed out that Masterworks doesn’t play real well with Dropbox, but this was a recent surprise. We’ve changed our production process to save all work to the C: MWorks Generated default folder and compile (using Bluebeam). We can then transfer the PDFs to our Dropbox-resident project folders and our clients can use the resulting PDF individual and compiled files as they need to.