MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-09-19 |
| FROM | Steve Milo
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] DRM and the Upgrade Escalator is starting Now
|
The most frightening problem with this is that in a scenario such as Enron
the little emails that contained the damning evidence will cease to exist.
Steve M
On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Ruben I Safir wrote:
>
>
> New Office locks down documents
> Last modified: September 2, 2003, 4:00 AM PDT
> By David Becker
> Staff Writer, CNET News.com
> Print story E-mail story
>
> As digital media publishers scramble to devise a foolproof method of
> copy protection, Microsoft is ready to push digital rights management
> into a whole new arena--your desktop.
>
> Office 2003, the upcoming update of the company's market-dominating
> productivity package, for the first time will include tools for
> restricting access to documents created with the software. Office
> workers can specify who can read or alter a spreadsheet, block it from
> copying or printing, and set an expiration date.
>
> The technology is one of the first major steps in Microsoft's plan to
> popularize Windows Rights Management Services, a wide-ranging plan to
> make restricted access to information a standard part of business
> processes.
>
> Analysts say it represents a badly needed new avenue for boosting sales
> of Microsoft's server software and an opportunity to lock out
> competitors, including older versions of Office. It also gives
> businesses that skipped on the last round or two of Office upgrades a
> new reason to bite this time.
>
> "If Office 2003 was just another incremental upgrade, they'd have a hard
> time getting businesses interested," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst
> for Jupiter Research. "For most people, the pinnacle of functionality in
> Office applications came in 1995. But there are more things that can be
> done using Office as a platform for delivering new services."
>
> The new rights management tools splinter to some extent the
> long-standing interoperability of Office formats. Until now, PC users
> have been able to count on opening and manipulating any document saved
> in Microsoft Word's ".doc" format or Excel's ".xls" in any compatible
> program, including older versions of Office and competing packages such
> as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice. But
> rights-protected documents created in Office 2003 can be manipulated
> only in Office 2003.
>
> "There's certainly a lock-in factor," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with
> Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft would love people to use Office and
> only Office. They made very sure that Office has these features that
> nobody else has."
>
> Information Rights Management (IRM) tools will be included in the
> professional versions of all Office applications, including the Word
> processor and Excel spreadsheet programs.
>
> To use IRM features, businesses will need a server running Microsoft's
> Windows Server 2003 operating system and Windows Rights Management
> Services software. The server software will record permission rules set
> by the document creator, such as other people authorized to view the
> document and expiration dates for any permissions. When another person
> receives that document, they briefly log in to the Windows Rights
> Management server--over the Internet or a corporate network--to validate
> the permissions.
>
> Dan Leach, Microsoft's lead product manager for Office, said rights
> management features were built into the new Office based on ongoing
> discussions with customers.
>
> "We asked people what types of things would you like to do that you
> can't do now, and what they said is they'd like to spread large amounts
> of information around to more of their people--but they have concerns
> that the wider they spread information, the more likely it is to become
> available to the wrong people," he said.
>
> Gartenberg said there's a valid need for such services, especially as
> office workers become more mobile and more sensitive information is
> stored on PCs.
>
> "If you're a senior executive and you're carrying around your five-year
> business plan, you probably want to have that information secured so
> only you can read it," he said.
>
> Businesses can lock down such documents now with third-party tools such
> as encryption software, but embedded rights management tools in the
> document creation software are much easier and more likely to be used,
> Gartenberg said. "The harder you make security to use for the end user,
> the less people are going to use it," he said.
>
> Directions on Microsoft's Rosoff said there's a valid business reason
> for encoding rights management into documents, as shown by Microsoft's
> travails with leaked software code and documents.
>
> Pushing server sales
> As with many Microsoft innovations, the new IRM tools also happen to
> benefit the software giant's sales in a complementary market--server
> software--where there's room for growth, as opposed to the fairly
> saturated market for desktop applications. Both IRM and expanded XML
> (Extensible Markup Language) functionality--the two biggest areas of
> innovation in Office 2003--tap into Microsoft's server software. IRM in
> particular requires Windows Server 2003, which businesses have been slow
> to adopt since Microsoft finally unveiled it earlier this year.
>
> "When you dominate a market, you change that market," Rosoff said.
> "Office already has all the document management features people could
> possibly want. The only way to add value to Office is to make it part of
> this larger system that adds value."
>
> Microsoft's Leach said Windows Server 2003 simply was the best avenue
> for delivering rights management functions. "To solve the problem our
> customers identified...it requires the ability to take advantage of some
> of the capabilities in Windows Server 2003," he said. "There are many
> companies that have already invested in Windows Server...and this is
> certainly going to be a differentiator for them."
>
> Rosoff said Microsoft appears to be less concerned about competitors,
> however, than getting existing customers to upgrade. "I don't think
> they're extremely worried about the threat of OpenOffice," he said.
> "They're worried that documents management is a fairly mature technology
> that's pretty widely available, so they need to come up with a
> compelling way to do it."
>
> There's also the potential for confusion in companies that don't upgrade
> every desktop to Office 2003 at the same time. Workers with Office 2003
> will be able to produce documents colleagues with older versions can't
> use.
>
> "The big question is whether they'll try to bring some backward
> compatibility," Jupiter's Gartenberg said. "If business users insist on
> a higher level of interoperability with their existing software, that
> could be a real challenge. It's very hard to go back and re-architect
> some of the security features for the older systems."
>
> Leach said Microsoft will provide a free plug-in for its Internet
> Explorer Web browser that will let it display rights-protected Office
> documents.
>
> "We recognize that people are going to want to take advantage of this
> that don't have Office 2003," he said. "This way, they can see the
> document in a browser window (and) they can print, copy or forward," as
> decided by the document creator.
>
> Leach added that even for organizations that adopt Office 2003, rights
> management will still be the exception rather than the rule when
> creating documents.
>
> "It's not something that you would set up as the default, so that every
> document I would create is rights management protected," he said. "It's
> important that you make a choice to apply rights management to a
> document for very specific reasons."
>
> Rosoff said IRM should see fairly quick adoption--at least compared with
> complex XML-based functions to be tied into Office 2003--because it
> solves an immediate business problem and is relatively cheap and easy to
> implement.
>
> "It's pretty clear with digital rights management what it is and what
> problems it's trying to solve," he said. "It's not going to be adopted
> en masse, but I think they'll have a good rollout department by
> department for people dealing with more sensitive documents."
> Related stories
>
> * Microsoft puts price, date on new Office
> August 19, 2003
> * Microsoft buddies up with new Office
> July 17, 2003
> * Ballmer touts DRM to customers
> May 7, 2003
> * Next Windows leaks onto Net
> March 4, 2003
> * Microsoft expands rights management tool
> February 21, 2003
> * Get this story's "Big Picture"
>
> Related quotes
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Fair Use -
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NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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