Microsoft® Office Excel 2003 Inside Out

Controlling Document Access with Information Rights Management

One of the more important new features in Office 2003 is support for information rights management (IRM) technology. IRM lets you, as the creator of an Excel (or other Office) document, specify which users or groups of users are permitted to read, edit, print, or copy that document. As a means of preventing unauthorized access to or use of your work, it's a more robust mechanism than traditional firewall methods because the access controls remain with your file, even if your file is removed to a different storage medium. It's also both more convenient and more robust than file-level ...