According to Azhar Hussain from Adobe, this is a HIGH PRIORITY on their roadmap. Since nothing has been done, announced, communicated or changed since September 2023, I can only fear what happens if it is NOT a high priority..

Password protection option would be invaluable for thousands of agencies clients.
We get this request from our clients ALL THE TIME.

Make us happy Adobe :)

UPDATE:

Apparently, Abhinav Kaushik doesn't work at Adobe anymore and hasn't for some time. That's probably the reason this critical request has been forgotten about. I have raised one ticket after another to get this ball rolling again, and with a LOT of patience, time and effort I got to one of the new developers of this piece of software Azhar Hussain. I will copy and paste the mail he sent me below. In short: don't get your hopes up - Adobe is not inclined to listen and even less to actually do something worthwhile for their clients who have been (not so) patient for more than 5 years... they're delaying hoping we will forget. Truth be said: we will. We'll just switch to other software. I believe they're waiting to cancel the whole interactive publishing - I can see no other reason for Adobe dragging their feet with this. Not if they are serious about listening to us.

Here's the email:

-------------------------------------

Hi Igor,

I sincerely apologize for the delay in getting back to you here.

With regards to the problem that you’ve highlighted, I appreciate all the details that you have shared as well as the engagement on the UV threads. I would like to assure you that this concern is a high priority item on our roadmap and we are most assuredly listening to the community feedback.
We’ve actively evaluated both the proposed solutions – i) Password Protection and ii) Support for 3rd party hosting but
unfortunately, in light of other features and product enhancements which were more critical, and the effort required to do justice to this feature, we were not able to pick up this feature for 2023 planning.

Would the capability to export out the Publish Online document as a HTML5 package that maybe hosted anywhere, solve your concerns in terms of privacy and security?
While I would not be able to provide an ETA for when this feature would be available, I am confident that we would be able to pick this up as part of our 2024 roadmap.
As you may appreciate, these solutions are complicated in nature and require careful consideration before we ship these out for our customers.
If you have any further questions or if there's anything you would like to discuss, I will be happy to setup some common time for us.

Thank you
Azhar Hussain
------------------------------

obviously!

This feature request has been here since 2017! It has been voted into the top for a LONG time, but nothing NOTHING is being done... Still, just up for review since 2020... The problem is still there! this makes me incredibly angry, unheard, unseen, and it feels like Adobe doesn't take its customers seriously. IT'S BEEN HERE 6 YEARS!!!!!

ADOBE! START LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS!!!!!!!!

Allowing password-protected links would enable us to have subscribers view our content, rather than the public. It's very important in showing value to our content

How is it April of 2023 and this feature is still not added? It's almost as if you're purposely dropping the ball. Do you not have the funding or are there some office politics invoved as why this hasn't happened? The inDesign publish Online feature has amazing possibilities but your priorities to get anything accomplished internally is hopeless. I have MANY issues and you never have any solutions. And for what you charge, it's quite wild that you aren't on top if it. With the advent of Ai, if you don't get yourselves together, you'll be left in the dust. Saying this as someone who uses your software for my clients, and it's pushing me to start looking for alternatives.

My client has ordered me to take down ALL the interactive documents published on the CC servers since it is not within their security influence, and forbidden to use them ever again. Security- and privacy issues are a growing concern. There is no way to password-protect the interactive documents or allow only access through their own proxy servers... so then we need a way for them to host the documents themselves on their Sharepoint intranet or other secure servers. Interactive pdf (or what's left of it) is as dead as a doornail, so that is no alternative; export as epub requires a reader and doesn't work in browsers... In conclusion: if this feature is not implemented quickly, they (and us, sadly too) will be forced to turn our backs on Adobe as a partner.

That would be a shame

Please please add more privacy options! I'd love to have a password option. Also it would be great to have a duration i.e. publish something for 30 days and on the 31st day it is automatically hidden.

We have GDPR considerations with sensitive data. It would need to be self-hosted as well as password protected. Currently stuck making obsolete interactive PDFs! Adobe, please create this feature.

I too am an In5 user and have wondered about Adobe purchasing Ajar Production’s code and rolling it into InDesign. I suppose that Adobe would prefer for web design to concentrate in XD (or Dreamweaver). I wish to retain GREP and other features, my experience, and my work. (I see someone on Adobe XD User Voice requesting hanging punctuation. We have that in InDesign and Publish Online supports it, albeit without selectable text. I wish Publish Online supported a selectable text overlay).

I would absolutely LOVE this password protected option! I'm a Realtor and this would be a game changer for me!

YES!!!

I use publish online to send proofs to clients. Would love this so I and my clients can feel safe that their documents are safe.

Publish Online and Interactivity are the best things happened to InDesign.

If Adobe adds password protection/user based login, and self-hosting, that's going to be next level.

They have been investigating and reviewing this feature since 2019 but still nothing happened.

Adobe Team, please buy in5 or their team and speedup the rollout of such amazing features before some other programs completely take out existing users.

in5 has amazing features like flipcards, scrolling frames, export to html and resizable liquid layout. We want all these in InDesign. Please please bring them here. 🙏

Agreed Online Publish password protection would make this viable choice

Agree - please make this happen. Or speed up native hosting.

additional related thought... currently anything I publish with the Publish Online feature is tied strictly to MY Adobe ID. This makes it not a great solution for publishing anything mission critical for my company. If I leave the company, so does access to those published documents, unless I share my login credentials with other people, which is obviously a security no-no.

I love the concept of publish online, and use it in a number of instances when I need something quickly accessible via a web browser. However, because I can't password protect or otherwise restrict access, I have to be cautious not to publish proprietary company information this way. If I could export to this format, but host the files on our company intranet with it's existing access control, that would open up a number of possibilities when publishing training material and other sensitive information.

Our government, academic, and corporate clients (and us too!) would love this...but the files can't be uploaded to someone's cloud server...not even Adobe's.

They'd be willing to pay for a self-hosted edition of Publish Online.

In fact, I'd bet that this feature would revolutionize the publishing world, just as Acrobat did 30 years ago.

Think about it, Adobe.