Digital Restrictions Management in Office 11

conaone writes "According to a Microsoft Watch, there is a feature in the leaked Office 2003 called "Information Rights Management." A lot more control over documents with this... the story says: "Microsoft is threading DRM throughout the Office 2003 suite, allowing restrictions to be set on Outlook mail messages, as well as on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Using "permission templates," document authors can determine restriction policies to be applied to entire categories of documents, according to Microsoft's site." Here's a link to the whole story."

Comments

Re:I just bought a new laptop

[airrage]

Actually, Open Office, cannot do all the things office can do. The problem comes in where you define as what is Office? First, most think of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access (Professional) as the standard office suite. But now, with the 2000 versions, include Project/Project Server, Visio, MapPoint, Frontpage, Publisher, and the list goes on and on.

Secondly, I think you mean to say that it can do everything MS can do considering the basic functionality I use. This is probably true with any productivity suite out there, since they all essentially do the same basic things.

However, if you take Excel for example, and have seen the myriad ways in which it is used, sometimes other packages have similar functionality, and often times it is completely unique to MS Office.

I can wear gloves and shorts like Mike Tyson and say, 'See I'm a boxer now, I'm sparring and jumping rope, I can do anything Mike can do.' Then Mike connects and you realize the difference.

The only place where things are probably similar is WORD, which boiled down could be replaced by just about anything, really.

You argument is good, except for the problems noted with #4, but otherwise you've made a good argument.

First use of DMCA to protect file format

[0x0d0a]

Incidently, this may be the first time someone's tried using the DMCA to enforce *file format* incompatibility. MS has done it before with copyrights (claiming that the C header files in wine used to implement Win32 were "derivative" of their own header files), with trade secrets (claiming that the "open" spec for their Kerberos modifications were protected as a "trade secret" and that no one else could implement it). It's been done before with patents (people claiming that an executable packer uses a patented algorithm). The special cases the DMCA puts into law are the only fork of IP that hasn't yet been used to try to ensure incompatibility.

Oh, and I dunno what MS's lawyers were threatening Nullsoft with if they didn't disable their "save to WAV" feature whenever users play a WMA file in WinAmp, but that theoretically could have been patent claims, so this may be a grand slam for MS in terms of misapplying IP law to screw the consumer if they try to go with a competitor's product -- they alone will have covered the entire gamut.

Re:I just bought a new laptop

[Watts Martin]

The only place where things are probably similar is WORD, which boiled down could be replaced by just about anything, really...

Were that only the case.

Take a real-life case: doing a manuscript for a novel in one file. This requires a few basic things:

1. A title page with its own formatting.
2. Every chapter starts with its own page that has no header and a footer consisting of just one centered page number.
3. Every other page in the chapter has no footer but does have a simple header.
4. Ideally all the spacing should be done in styles for consistency, particularly vertical layout (i.e., the cover page is vertically centered, the chapter titles start 4" from the page's top edge, etc.).

Sounds simple, right?

You'd be amazed at how few modern word processors are able to do this. I say "modern" because, ironically, this was pretty trivial with most non-GUI word processors like WordStar. (Incidentally, to those who'd suggest using a text editor and LaTeX, it's a good idea in theory, but in practice you want a manuscript to be set in Courier, to use underlines instead of italics, to use "--" and straight quotes instead of em dashes and typographer's quotes, etc. Ironically, LaTeX and other good print formatters have a lot of trouble dumbing their output down sufficiently.)

At any rate, once you get into Word's collaboration features, forms, mail merge, multilevel indexing, and so on (all things I've actually had to use!), competitors get even fewer and farther between--for the most part, in fact, you may pretty much be limited to OpenOffice and WordPerfect. There are a few single-platform competitors which come close in the feature department and even surpass Word for certain functions (Nota Bene on Windows, Nisus Writer on the Mac), but the uncomfortable truth is that Word really doesn't have a lot of competition out there in terms of its feature set.