Adobe Acrobat Professional/LiveCycle Security

Question

I am shopping for a good form tool, and have tried using Adobe Acrobat and LiveCycle.  However I ran into one critical failure: you can't password protect a document from content editing while still leaving it open for document assembly.  So if people need to assemble custom form packages from a pre-set group of forms, they must be given access to also change the form content.  My company is far too large for this model to work. 
Is there any possibility of increasing the level of security customization within the next two years?   Alternately, is there any other recommended form software that succeeds where Adobe fails?  Or did I just miss something?

Answer 1

The key problem is that assembling secure documents can't be permitted.
Consider the problem, you'd have two documents, let's say they have passwords A and B. The assembled document could only have one password -- so one would have to be discarded. By assembling a file with known password with one with unknown password, an end user could potentially remove the security.
In any case, I wouldn't put much store in password security. As Acrobat warns you, third party tools may ignore it altogether.
Another and serious problem with assembling forms is how to deal with name clashes.
By the way, Adobe's solution to assembling secure documents is to use portfolios. I mention it though it's unlikely to be what you want in this case.