Sometimes the Corporate IT Department makes me wonder

So today I got an email from the corporate IT department. The memo was outlining the new help desk that is being implemented to provide 24 hour support to us. However what really makes me chuckle is the format the memo was sent in. It was sent as a Portable Document Format or PDF which makes perfect sense. However what did not make sense was the way that the PDF was created. It was created by scanning the document using an HP scanner.

You are probably wondering how this fact was discerned, the first way was the fuzz on the text, and the small stripe on the document. Then I looked at it using Adobe Bridge and got the information that it was created using “HP Digital Sending Device” and a size of 487 KB (498,727 bytes) for a two page document. So me being me and curious I opened it with Acrobat 8 Pro as it allows Optical Character Recognition or OCR and exported it out to an Rich Text Format or RTF file. I then opened that RTF and created a PDF using Acobrat 8 Pro. It was 24 KB (21,951 bytes) and searchable and had e-mail links that worked… etc. It was a document not a picture.

So I started just kind of wondering, why? I really could not come up with a reason. If they wanted to secure it, well it really did not do any good by how easily I ran the OCR on it. I could just as easily tweak it using PhotoShop or any other photo retouching software on it. Also if one use the real Adobe Acrobat software, one could actually set up security on it.

Then I thought a little more about it, perhaps the user did not have Adobe Acrobat. I previously did not have a copy of Adobe Acrobat but used an open source software package to create PDFs. Also Microsoft Office 2007 supports creating the PDF format directly. I also did a quick Google Search and found lots of applications that would create a PDF, a quick look in SourceForge.net and found over 900 from a very basic query of just “PDF” so there were lots of ways to create this PDF.

So it just makes me chuckle that the IT team would not use any of the tools just outlined. I can understand why not everyone knows about these, but it is the IT department they should know about this stuff.