Rights Management Services Secures Corporate Data

Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) lets users place restrictions (such as “do not print”) on documents and messages and ensure that those restrictions are enforced. RMS could be useful in organizations that are subject to formal confidentiality regulations or are heavily dependent on trade secrets and other intellectual property, as well as departments within all organizations where confidentiality is essential, such as legal and human resources.

However, deploying RMS requires careful planning and considerable training for both administrators and users. In addition, organizations need the Professional Editions of Office 2003 or a third-party solution to protect material with RMS, and they cannot easily share RMS-protected content with large numbers of other organizations, such as partners. In Apr. 2005, Microsoft released the first service pack to RMS, which addressed some issues with deployment, but did little to address these core issues. (For details, see the sidebar “RMS SP1 Addresses Barriers to Deployment“.)