Rights management for small businesses
Deb Shinder
Published: 23 Feb 2007 13:15 GMT
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...
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