MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-09-16 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] DRM and the Upgrade Escalator is starting Now
|
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"
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