Rights Management Technologies

Three different tiers of hosted rights management are available from Microsoft.

RMS for Individuals is a free service that allows users to receive protected content and securely decrypt it, while retaining the protection rules put in place on the original content by the sender or creator. Although RMS for Individuals currently enables protection of content being shared with others, Microsoft has clarified that such use is for evaluation purposes only.

Office 365 integrates most Azure Rights Management (RM) functionality directly into its hosted services and the Office 365 ProPlus desktop suite, and organizations can provision rights management directly from their Office 365 administrative console. RMS for Office 365 enables both protection and consumption of protected content by licensed users and administrators.

Azure RM is a stand-alone rights management service (RMS) that is also included in Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) and licensed through a User Subscription License. The only feature Azure RM offers that is not included in RMS for Office 365 is the application of protection to content on servers other than Exchange or SharePoint on-premises, such as Windows Server file shares, using the Windows Server File Classification Infrastructure toolkit, which can help automatically identify and protect content.