Rights Management Comes to the Enterprise

A forthcoming technology called Windows Rights Management (RM) will help organizations control the distribution and use of confidential data such as documents and e-mail messages. In addition to a new server component, Windows RM relies on client applications to do much of the work, including presenting the user interface for protecting data and enforcing these restrictions for other users. Thus, its success will largely depend on how well Microsoft and other developers support it in applications-if the system is too complicated or easily breakable, it will be ignored.

The core of Windows RM is a server component called Rights Management Services (RMS). Microsoft considers RMS to be part of Windows Server 2003, but it is on a different release schedule and is expected in the second half of 2003. Office 2003, available in summer 2003, will be the first Microsoft application to support Windows RM, and the company will release SDKs in spring 2003 for third-party developers to support it.