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I am working in an environment with about 1300 systems with a variety of adobe products being deployed one of which is the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC version 2018.009.20050.
I was tasked with finding a way to disable Protected Mode\View as it is causing an issue with our users and their older PDFs.
Through most of my research everything points to how to do it in the gui and some antiquated registry keys for 2015 version.
After a great deal of time vested in what seems to be a dead end I am here to ask if there is a registry key I can deploy using GPO in order to turn "OFF" Protected view :Adobe Acrobat Pro DC version 2018.009.20050?
Something strange is that I also notice that there was supposed to be a check box for "Enable Protected mode at startup" on the Security [Enhanced] section. It seems to be removed from the 2018 version or could it be due to a customization wizard. Here is a link to what I thought it was supposed to look like with the check box in place.
Keep in mind for mine that check box and the nomenclature is removed leaving a gap of space and then it starts off with "Protected View".
Any and all help is appreciated..
VR
DAVINCI02
1 Correct answer
It's a good idea to leave Protected Mode enabled. It should be transparent to users and not impact any workflows.
As an alternative to disabling PV, you could preset privileged locations (hosts, files, folders), and end users would not automatically go to the read-only PV and have to trust the doc source to continue. For example, you could trust everything on your intranet as well as anything you configured as trusted on the Windows OS.
Anyway, glad you can move forward. Post back if you have an
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Protected View and Protected Mode are two different things. What are you trying to accomplish and why? I suspect you only want to disable Protected View, but you might need/want to consider alternatives.
Here's the PM pref: Protected Mode
Here's the PV pref: Trust Manager
HTH
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You are correct in my desire to turn off protected view in my adobe acrobat pro DC version 2018.
I was throwing out the option to turn off protected mode as a overarching idea to address the issue if i could not address protected view.
I am trying to disable protected view for all 1300 systems I have on my network and my existing administrative templates in group policy don't seem to taking care of the issue. So my next step was to find the registry that governs that setting and push it to all of my clients so protected view is "off"
I will take a look at the two links and see what I can glean.. Thank you for your reply i will let you know if it works or doesn't.
P.S. As to the why... some of our VIPS have deemed the process of enabling all features a nuisance and a waste of time. Regardless of the impact or implications of doing what i am requesting.
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It's a good idea to leave Protected Mode enabled. It should be transparent to users and not impact any workflows.
As an alternative to disabling PV, you could preset privileged locations (hosts, files, folders), and end users would not automatically go to the read-only PV and have to trust the doc source to continue. For example, you could trust everything on your intranet as well as anything you configured as trusted on the Windows OS.
Anyway, glad you can move forward. Post back if you have an issue.
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I wanted to let you know that you were right... the iProtectedView resolved the issue. Also per your recommendation I am leaving on protected mode .
I was amazed that the key had changed from bProtectedView to iProtected view.
I will post your suggestion of privilege locations to the powers that be and see what they say.. I hope you have a great new year and thank you again!!
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I hate to be rude but saying, " It should be transparent to users and not impact any workflows." is not an answer. It may be transparent, but impacts workflows when one has to print multiple documents form an email and each document must first "Enable All Features" and then the additional steps behind the process delays the printing of each document. Please provide a common sense way to disable Protected Mode so that it stops impacting workflows.
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Hi Laura,
My answer above is likely the right one for you. Read David's response above as well. Protected Mode does not ask anyone to "Enable All Features". PM is transparent to users, there is no UI, dialog, etc. associated with that feature (unless there's been a new behavior change I'm unaware of).
However, Protected View does show the yellow message bar. As David pointed above, there's a registry pref to turn that off. See Sandbox Protections — Acrobat Application Security Guide
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thank you for your time but sadly, no, that is not the answer for me. I work with upwards of 20+ companies and websites per month. I cannot add each one when I need to quickly access their pdf's. I am not an Administrator in my company either, just a flunky, so I cannot change settings to which I do not have access. I had hoped that this was something that was not built in as unchangeable on the lower tiers of users.
In my case, I will just have to continue wasting time and grumbling about this issue. Thanks again.
Laurel
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I see: this is an enterprise deployment forum for admins who control machine configs across their organization, so the answer was an "admin/machine config" answer. Security should belong to the organizations who own the product, network, and data: it's their job to protect themselves as needed.
Still, I'd prefer to give you an answer you'd that would help, and while there may not be any, here's more info:
- If the problem is that other people in your workflow see the yellow message bar (YMB), then that's admin-controlled and there's nothing you can do. Admins have several options on their end (link above).
- If the problem is you see the YMB, you may have several options:
1. You can disable Protected View IF your admin has not locked the feature so that you can't. In many organizations, end users can not change such app security settings (for good reason).
2. You can trust files, folders, and hosts so you don't see the YMB for files in those locations: Enhanced security setting for PDFs, Adobe Acrobat
3. Contact your admin and have them configure security settings.
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