Is PKI easy to use?

The document entitled What is a PKI? from the "Treasury Board of Canada Secretaries" has a good explanation of PKI and concludes with:

"A Transparent and Seamless Operation
PKI's beauty is that it performs these encryption, decryption and identity-verifying functions invisibly to Bob and Alice, while ensuring that their transaction is nearly as private and secure as a face-to-face meeting."

IBM says: "Computer security experts call PKI the "panacea" for secure, trusted e-business". This interesting document also says: "The system uses those keys to encrypt and decrypt e-mail documents, and authenticate the people who send and receive them."

Although these are otherwise good documents to read, the feeling the reader gets is that PKI is automated and seamless. This is completely wrong. Using conventional PKI creats enormous burden on all parties involved.

We, at SAFe-mail, hope that our system really does create a PKI environment that is seamless and automated.