If you think rights management pertains only to digital music and movies, think again. Small and medium-sized businesses produce content every day, much of which needs to be protected from misuse.
You probably already have many mechanisms in place to prevent unauthorised users from accessing information on your network. These would include perimeter protection such as firewalls, access controls such as share level and file level permissions, and encryption of sensitive documents. So you may be wondering why you need yet another layer of data protection.
All of the above security mechanisms are designed to keep people from accessing information. But sometimes you need to allow others to access information. The problem is that once you give them access, you may lose control over what they do with that information.
For example, you want to allow another user to read a document or spreadsheet you've prepared — but you don't want that user to make copies of it. Or you need to send information via email, but you don't want the recipient to forward that message to others. Maybe you'd prefer that the user not even be able to go back and read the message a month later.
That's where rights management comes in. Just as the music companies and movie studios use digital rights management (DRM) technology that allows you to use their products in a certain way but prevents you from engaging in prohibited uses, such as making copies, you can use rights management to control what users can do with the documents and emails you send them.
One solution is Microsoft's Rights Management Services (RMS) and Information Rights Management (IRM) technologies. You can use RMS/IRM to extend your control over information even when you must share it with others.
What are RMS and IRM?
RMS and IRM work together to provide rights management for documents created with Microsoft Office. RMS is built into Windows Server 2003 R2 and Longhorn Server. RMS client software is built into Windows Vista and is available for Windows 2000 and XP as a free download.
IRM is the rights management component in RMS-enabled applications such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. IRM is a part of Office 2003 and 2007.
How RMS/IRM works
With RMS and IRM, you can control what a recipient can do with an Office document or an email message created in Microsoft Office. You can:
- Prevent the recipient from copying text from the message or document
- Prevent the recipient from printing the message or document
- Prevent the recipient from forwarding an email message
- Set an expiration date, after which the recipient won't be able to access the message or document
The recipient needs Office 2003 or 2007 or Internet Explorer to open an RMS-protected message or document. If a user tries to open it in an earlier version of Office, another application (such as Notepad or Open Office) or a third-party email client, access will be denied.
It's important to note that although the RMS-enabled application will prevent users from copying, forwarding or printing the protected information (by greying out those options in the menus), a determined person could still...
Talkback
Please do not do this. What you are doing is basically handing all of your content over to MS. You can easily protect documents by keeping them away from others. This is exactly what is wrong with Microsoft's thinking. They will have so much power over your company that basically "All your docs belong to us"
Your reasoning is absolutely absurd. You obviously do not understand Windows Rights Management and how it works. The technology combines both asymmetric and symmetric key cryptography as well as alleviating the problems around key distribution that plague other PKI like infrastructures. An organization that deploys Rights Management Services within its network computing resource domain always has complete control over content protected by users who are members of that domain. Microsoft has no access nor any ability to gain access to an organizations service or service licensor keys. I would be glad to further discuss with you so you don’t continue to misrepresent rights management technology.
Nick Atalla, Senior Architect with GigaTrust, the content protect company.
Well you should know as you appear to have all the technical qualifications to go along with what you are saying AND no doubt are going to make a handsome buck out of implementing this for hundreds of companies that will be scared into using it.
Basically ALL DRM is bad.
I didn't mean MS would have the ability to STEAL your information. I meant something more along the line of accidentally de-authorising the files you have DRM'd and not being able to access them in any way shape or form.
By simply complicating the matter further by "securely" locking your files will inevitably lead to some spectacular cock ups and lost data.
But don't let my "complete lack of knowledge" forestall your argument.
The Microsoft RM is a great idea:
It will mean important, legally required documents, can become inaccessible. You will be able to say its all down to Microsoft in the criminal proceedings.
You will be able to do clandestine price fixing, selling peerages without being found out.
You can insure that all your important contacts have to run the latest versions of Windows so doing away with the anarchist Open Source users.
You can set up that terrorist network knowing the information is truly secret.
It will allow a whole new industry of recovery specialists to develop so more jobs.
You will be able to justify updating all your hardware to handle the extra overheads so no need to keep your computer past its yearly sell by (scrap) time.