Windows Rights Management Services for Windows 2003

Microsoft announced that new Rights Management Service (RMS) will be included in Windows Server 2003. RMS will help companies secure internal business information such as reports and other documents. Microsoft said that RMS will let applications such as email clients, word processors, and information portals, to be built so that administrators can assign digital rights that control who has access to information and the type of access a user has. For example, administrators could assign rights that control forwarding, printing, and expiration dates for information. RMS will allow enforcement of such rights policies broadly across an enterprise.

Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Security Business Unit, said, "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."

RMS will be an ASP.NET Web service, based on Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML). The company will release software development kits (SDKs) to allow developers to begin building rights management capabilities into their solutions. Beta code for RMS will become available in the second quarter of 2003.