With its latest release of the omnipresent Office applications, Microsoft has emphasized collaborating with Office content as well as securing it. But Microsoft is not the only player offering rights management for Office documents.
Waltham, Mass.-based Authentica unveiled its Secure Office application at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week. Secure Office is packaged software that offers active rights management for Microsoft Office documents by using a system of policies, encryption, permissions, and expirations.
While just a few years ago the target market for such a product might have been limited to the über-paranoid, Authentica's entry into the market for locking up Office documents appears to be well-timed. Daily security threats on the Internet have made security a top-of-mind issue, and the ability to secure documents created in the most popular desktop applications in the world has implications that range far beyond the desktops and hard drives of creators and end-users.
Corporate compliance with any number of federal and industry regulations require the type of audit trails and document control that a product like Secure Office can offer. Privacy requirements call for the protection of human resources data. Imagine the publicity nightmare when a corporate restructuring plan falls under the wrong eyes.
The global economy also poses its own risks. Documents, product details, and specifications are passed over the public Internet to and from suppliers and partners all over the world. By adding rights management to Office documents, suppliers and partners can keep the details of one customer's product away from those working on a competitor's product, essentially firewalling off one R&D team from another, for example.
"There is definitely pent-up demand for this technology," Vic DeMarines, director of product management and marketing for Authentica, told Intranet Journal. "Every corporation has trade secrets and compliance issues. We believe the market is emerging for that."
Authentica touts Secure Office as packaged software that is easy to set up and requires little outside support. A central policy server is placed on the existing company network. The server interacts with existing authentication services like Active Directory or iPlanet. It is the server that maintains the policies placed on the content, as well as the permissions granted to users, but the content is independent of the server, as is the distribution of locked-down documents.
Users of Office applications that have been locked by Secure Office notice very little that is different from their traditional interaction with Office apps. If they are not allowed to print a document, then the Print function in the interface is grayed out. If they aren't allowed to make changes, the Save As function is grayed out. Suppliers or partners accessing a document over an extranet, for example, use the same authentication they use to access the extranet for access to documents.
Before unveiling a product designed for Office documents, Authentica focused on secure publishing and e-mail with technology that converted documents to PDF format, which has its own limitations. "It's not really a collaborative format," DeMarines said. "If I wanted to collaborate, that's the world of Microsoft Office."
But Authentica is not the only player in what has become known as the enterprise digital rights management (E-DRM) market to come to this conclusion. SealedMedia's solution can lock down 14 file formats, including Microsoft's Office applications, HTML, images, and audio. The most interesting entrant in the market may be Microsoft itself, which has included its Information Rights Management (IRM) with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.
DeMarines said Authentica doesn't see Microsoft itself as a direct competitor for issuing active rights to Office documents. The rights and policies issued by Microsoft's solution are more static than Authentica, he said. But the differences between Microsoft and Secure Office run deeper than just the functionality.
Secure Office supports Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and integration with Outlook, for Office 2000 and newer versions (including Office XP and Office 2003). Microsoft's rights management requires upgrades to its 2003 products, which is on many IT schedules for around 2005 — about the time Microsoft may be heading to its Longhorn operating system.
"There's a wide disparity of adoption of Windows and Office," DeMarines said, adding that large customers are rarely using the total-Microsoft environment where IRM functions best.
Microsoft's rights management, not surprisingly, integrates closely with the company's authentication products — Active Directory and Passport. Passport has become a consumer product without any real traction in the enterprise. Secure Office, meanwhile, will integrate with iPlanet or Novell directories, in addition to Active Directory, allowing collaboration with those using a different Authentication system.
With an entry price of around $50,000, Authentica is taking aim at Fortune 1000 customers for Secure Office. Utilizing a partner program, however, the technology has been made available to service providers, such as Case Central, an ASP that offers hosted review and repository services to law firms.
