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How Do You Monitor Documents?

Posted by samzenpus on from the protect-yourself-at-all-times dept.

JumpDrive writes "I have been presented with a problem recently, which I know others have probably faced. During the last month, one of our customers accused us of providing another customer with their specification. So the question arose: how do we, or can we trace documents and find if they are being opened or used somewhere where they weren't intended. We don't want to be restrictive, because at times, we have people all over the place, but if one of our documents were opened in a foreign country, that would arouse suspicions. Most of our documents are made with MS office suite, and I have been thinking of working on a macro to ping a server, but that would require the user to enable the macros, and it would also require the insertion into about 1000 documents. But it's been difficult for me to find a solution that doesn't prevent someone in Omaha from opening a document for legitimate use and is not a solution that can easily be disabled or hacked around."

3 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft Rights Management Server? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Informative

    See topic - MS do something which seems to be essentially *exactly* what you want, and since you are using MS Office, I would suggest giving it a try.

    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/rightsmgmt/default.mspx

  2. Active Directory Rights Management Services by lukas84 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The best solution to your problem probably would be using Microsoft's AD RMS.

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753531.aspx

    AD RMS provides you with the ability to control licensing, opening, printing, etc. of documents. This will provide you with the audit trail you migh tneed.

    Of course, you can still photograph every screen while scrolling through the pages, so it's essentially worthless in practice, but it might satisfy your customers demands for proper paperworks.

    Yep, implementing AD RMS will be a heck a lot of work, and you'll surely need to adjust your internal processes in order to incorporate AD RMS.

    What you're planning on doing is DRM: Which is, as all Slashdot readers know, impossible with a properly determined person. And in your case (industrial espionage), there are better people working on it than a few hackers that try cracking Blue-Ray in their spare time.

  3. Other Options by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    EMC IRM (Formerly Authentica (yes, there is a typo in the summary))

    Oracle IRM (Formerly SealedMedia)

    Liquid Machines

    Adobe LifeCycle Rights Management