Adobe Acrobat was the information that I was interested in, thank you very much. It may be that you have a specific version of it (paid?) That allows for enhanced functionality, but most people use the free basic version.
I don't think that the FollowHyperlink method by itself will get you to a solution, but I may be wrong. What I had hoped was that, once learning which software you were using, that we could try using the Shell method to execute the viewer with the pdf file, setting an option to open the file automatically with a password... But it turns out from my quick research that this is not possible with Adobe Acrobat, which is a bit frustrating.
I did a bit more digging and there is some free software called XPDFTools which includes a number of tools that are helpful when dealing with PDF files - like simple tools that extract text, or convert pages to images. It also include XPDFViewer, which performs the same PDF viewing function as Adobe Acrobat (but is a bit more basic). It allows for you to use the Shell method that I referenced above, but I don't know if this is a feasible option for you - it would require downloading the executable file, which is often prohibited on enterprise systems ...
I will give it some more thought, but maybe someone else will have a better solution? Here is a link to the viewer for your reference:
xpdf(1)
