Background
Firmex Redact lets you seamlessly redact personally identifiable and sensitive information without leaving your Firmex virtual data room. It is closely tied to Firmex's versioning control tools, so you can redact, unredact, and manage changes throughout your deal or project lifecycle.
Who can redact?
- Firmex Redact is available to Content Contributors and above.
- Firmex Redact must be enabled at the Site level, at which point it becomes available to all projects. Please contact your Firmex Account Manager to enable Firmex Redact.
What can be redacted?
- Firmex Redact can currently redact information from PDF documents.
- The PDF document can either be flat, or have OCR enabled (optical character recognition).
- The PDF document cannot be encrypted.
How Firmex Redact works
Firmex Redact provides several options for redacting your documents. You may redact by either manually drawing shapes around parts of the document you want to redact, or by using our Search & Redact function which will allow you to search for a term or phrase and redact all instances at once, or each instance one by one.
Each time you draw a shape or add a redaction using Search & Redact, the document is auto-saved as a draft. You may preview the document as you redact, and remove redactions as needed.
When you are ready to publish the redacted document, click the Publish button. A new version of the document is created. The content that you drew shapes around is fully eliminated. It cannot be searched or copied. It is only available to Content Contributors and above through the draft version of the document. Guest users - that is, Content Viewers and below - will only see the most recent version of the document (the Published version).
You may return to the Draft document - that is, the working copy of the document - and add or remove redactions, as needed.
How to add a redaction
Manually add a redaction to a document
- Find the document you want to redact.
- Right-click the document or click the down-arrow to the right of the document
- Select Add Redaction.
You are now viewing the document inside Firmex Redact. Click Add Redaction if it is not already selected. - Using your mouse, click-and-drag to select the information you want to redact.
- Repeat the step above to add to your redaction.
- Select Preview to see a preview of the redacted document. Areas highlighted in black will be redacted.
- Click Publish to finalize your redactions in a new version of a document. The Docexchange window appears, as publishing the document uploads a new version of the document.
When a redacted document is published it can be seen by Content Viewers who have permission to view the document.
Your redactions are automatically saved every time a redaction is added or removed. While in Draft status, your redactions can only be seen by Content Contributors or above.
Search and redact
Search and redact helps you find terms and phrases in a document and redact them quickly.
Note: Search and redact will only work on documents that have selectable text. That is, only documents with OCR applied to them before being uploaded to Firmex will be searchable. Learn more about OCR here.
To search and redact:
- Inside Firmex Redact, type in a term or phrase inside the Search Document field.
- The number of times the term appears in the document is displayed next to the search field.
- You may redact each term individually by clicking the 'Redact' button. Or, you may click the 'Redact All' button to redact all of the found terms at once. You may click the up and down arrows next to the search box to scroll through the results. Click the 'X' button to clear the search term.
How to remove a redaction
You can remove a redaction from a draft document that contains redacted content.
Remove individual redaction(s) from a draft document
- From the Firmex Redact window, select Add Redaction. Switch the option to Remove Redaction.
- An X appears next to each redaction in the document.
- Click the X to remove the redaction.
- You can preview the newly redacted document by clicking Preview.
- Click Publish to finalize your redactions in a new version of a document. When a redacted document is published, it can be seen by Content Viewers who have permission to view the document.
Remove all redactions from a document
- From the Firmex Redact window, select Remove All. All of the redactions in the document will be removed.
- A confirmation dialogue appears: Do you wish to delete the draft and all of the redacted areas?
Click Yes to begin redacting the document anew.
Redaction status
Draft vs. Published
Firmex Redact takes advantage of Firmex’s powerful versioning tool. A new version of the document is published whenever a new redaction is created. This means that a document that’s been redacted three times will have three versions. Version 3 will be displayed as the Published version.
Version 1 will be available behind the scenes and is known as a Draft version of the document.
The current Published version is the version that will be presented to Content Contributors and below. Previous versions will be available to Content Contributors and above.
Identifying Draft vs. Published redaction documents
- Draft redaction documents can be identified by the orange marker icon to the left of the document name.
- Published redaction documents can be identified by the gray marker icon to the left of the document name.
Keep in mind that only Content Contributors and above will see the redacted marker icons. Content viewers - that is, your guests - will only see the published version of a redacted document.
To view a draft version of a redacted document
To view a draft version of a document, click the orange marker in the Documents tab to the left of the document name. This displays the redacted document in its Draft status.
Alternatively, if the document has already been published, click the gray marker to the left of the document name. You can now view previous draft versions of the document.