OpenText last week released software aimed at helping organizations ensure their documents meet stringent regulatory rules, such as those stipulated in Sarbanes-Oxley.

The software, called LiveLink Review Manager for Acrobat, combines Acrobat PDF's review and comment features with OpenText's document management tools, enabling users to concurrently review, edit and add comments to un-modifiable PDFs.

With LiveLink Review Manager, users' changes are linked to the original document but maintained in separate comment files within the LiveLink document management repository. Editors, who use strict access controls and password-based permissions to access the original, can then assess changes and produce a new original. With this process, all changes are documented, complete with an audit trail, the firm said.

The software includes a Review Comments tab to Livelink, giving document authors easy access to review history, including the names of the reviewers, a link to the associated comment files, and the dates and times when the comment files were modified. Other features include support for a parallel, real-time review process, document security through user-defined permissions and audit trails.

Available Oct. 1, Livelink Review Manager works with Acrobat 5.0.5 and above. LiveLink Review Manager is a module of OpenText's core LiveLink enterprise suite. The license fees for core LiveLink start at $100,000 for the first 100 users. With volume pricing discounts, support for 1,000 named users costs approximately $340 per user, while support for more than 10,000 named users costs approximately $160 per user. The LiveLink Review Manager module costs extra, and on average starts at about $33 per user.