Full Worked Example: Encrypting PMLLIB

These are the steps you can follow to encrypt the PML files in a PMLLIB folder hierarchy. PMLLIB contains many files, some of them are PML files - which can be encrypted, and some of them are other types of files which cannot (for example icon and index files).

Steps you can follow are:

• Check that the files and folders you will be working with have current backups. If delete or overwrite your only copies of a file there is no way to get it back from an encrypted version.

• Find the PMLLIB folder you wish to encrypt, and make sure that no-one is using it. In this example I will assume that the folder is called 'pmllib' and that the PML Publisher encryption utility has been installed in the same folder.

• Start a command window.

• Change directory to the folder containing the PMLLIB folder.

• Rename the PMLLIB folder:

  rename pmllib pmllib_original

• Make a complete writeable version of the pmllib folder and all its contents in the original location:

  xcopy /E /I pmllib_original pmllib

• Encrypt from the pmllib_original back to pmllib (this will replace with encrypted versions all files that have .pmlmac, .pmlfrm, .pmlobj or .pmlfunc extensions, but leave other files unchanged)

  .\pmlencrypt.exe -pmllib pmllib_original pmllib

• Before distributing files containing Intellectual Property that you wish to protect you must check that all the correct files are encrypted. Folder comparison programs (such as 'Beyond Compare' from Scooter Software) allow you to identify files that were not changed by the pmlencrypt - for example because they have different file extensions or because files were read-only.