Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

Document Security with Information Rights Management (IRM)

Microsoft's new Information Rights Management (IRM) technology can give organizations unprecedented control over the information they generate. Using IRM, Word and Office users can not only restrict who can read documents, but prevent documents (or even excerpts from documents) from being printed, forwarded, or copied (see Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5. Controlling rights to a document from the Permission dialog box.

The limits remain in place no matter where the document is sent—dramatically reducing the risk of sensitive information falling into unauthorized hands. What's more, document creators ...