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E-Mail Controls in Office 2003
TiggsPanther writes "The BBC's Technology News reports than the next version of MS Office will include E-Mail controls which should limit way that e-mail messages can be forwarded.
Being tied into the Information Rights Management concept, it might be interesting to see how quickly this gets taken up."
We just received our Office 2003 discs yesterday. I installed Outlook 2003 because the vertical-side-panel-snap-together-do-hicky is pretty sweet. .NET Passport. .NET Passport is active.
If you use the e-mail DRM service(straight from the dialog box):
- You need a
- Your documents won't be sent to or stored by Microsoft.
- If Microsoft decides to end the trial, you can access the restricted documents and e-mail for at least three months, as long your
- Microsoft won't decrypt contect protected by the service unless a court order requires it.
I read something about being able to use DRM within an organization, but that it required running some sort of IRM server. Don't know anything else beyond that though.
Actually they thought of that. Cut/paste/print screen are disabled. Of course you can take a digital camera to it or write your own screen capture app but the intent is to prevent casual forwarding.
will be interesting to see how this works with non-MS email clients, esp on non-MS O/S's
As the article stated, "Microsoft says a free viewing program will be available for those who receive a protected document but are not using Office 2003."
However, since this is squarely targeted at corporate enviornments, I don't forsee this becoming a large problem.
Sure, it's bad for the end user information wants to be free blah blah blah, but companies want more control over where their information is going, and MS is providing it in this product. Don't want the FY04 budget leaked? Put a do-not-forward flag on it... Sure, you'll be able to screen-cap things, but casual copying will be prevented.
(We all know that protection can be circumvented by anyone with enough will... This is simply raising the bar for how much desire is necessary.)
That being said, I won't use it, but I'm sure there are corporations out there that will.
Since at least version 4 (maybe version 3.0) of Lotus Notes, you could prevent copying, printing and forwarding of a message. Under the delivery options when you're composing a new message, there is an option "Prevent Copying".
With notes, you could still grab a screen shot by pressing "Print Scrn", since that's tied into the OS, not the app.