My title is vague … sorry! I work for a company that hosts multiple training workshops across the globe. We’re looking for a cloud based service that allows us to upload our workbooks or participant guides in PDF form. The PDFs will have forms for workshop participants to add notes. We’d like to allow the participants access for a limited time to print their workbook and then either remove the PDF or lock it. My Googlefu is off and I’m having a hard time finding something similar on the internet. Any ideas?
You can share a dropbox folder, you can also just create a “working” folder for the class with clean master copies in a folder they cannot access. At the end of the class you can unlink any computers you do not want to have access anymore, takes just a few min to dump a classroom worth of shares.
You could use pretty much any cloud service, and give each class its own custom URL to the PDF file. (Randomly generated so it can’t be guessed; and make sure Google won’t index it also.) When the class is over, remove the PDF file from that particular URL. With a little more effort, you could make a quick-and-dirty web-based UI for this and automate it.
Keep in mind, sooner or later one of your students is going to re-post the file, so be prepared for that eventuality.
If they can print the .pdf they can copy it, regardless of the time frame of availability.