REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 21, 2003 — Microsoft Corp. today announced plans for Windows ® Rights Management Services (RMS), a new technology for Windows Server 2003 that will give organizations advanced ways to help secure sensitive internal business information including financial reports and confidential planning documents. Windows Rights Management Services will work with applications to provide a platform-based approach to providing persistent policy rights for Web content and sensitive corporate documents of all types. Beta code for Windows Rights Management Services will be broadly available in the second quarter of 2003.
“Customers have told us they need better solutions to help safeguard their critical business information,”
said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of the Security Business Unit at Microsoft.
“What’s really compelling about Rights Management technology is that it enables businesses to protect the information they most worry might leak either deliberately or inadvertently by putting persistent protections in the documents themselves.”
Using Windows Rights Management Services, applications such as information portals, word processors or e-mail clients can be built so that users will be able to easily designate both who can have access to specific content and what kinds of access rights they can have. Rights and policy are managed by the server, while clients running RMS-enabled applications allow users to apply rights with a click of a button. For example, Windows Rights Management Services can be used to control forwarding, copying and printing, as well as establishing time-based expiration rules. In addition, enterprises can enforce policy broadly and reliably by centrally delivering templates that automate the process for example, making the policy around what constitutes
“company confidential”
uniform and easy to manage.
Because Windows Rights Management Services technology is an ASP.NET Web service built on the Microsoft® .NET Framework, it can more easily interoperate with business processes via Web services. RMS technology uses XrML (Extensible Rights Markup Language), an emerging standard for the expression of rights on digital content. Microsoft will release two software development kits in the second quarter of 2003 to enable developers to begin to build rights management capabilities into a broad range of intra-enterprise solutions and applications for Windows clients.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software any time, any place and on any device.
More information about Windows Rights Management Services can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/rm/
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