Windows Vista Security For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Protecting Your Data with Rights Management Service

In This Chapter

• Explaining Rights Management Service (RMS) from a Vista perspective

• Seeing how Microsoft Office uses RMS to protect data on your Vista machine

• Understanding the difference between Digital Rights Management (DRM) and RMS

Have you ever sent an e‐mail to someone, who then forwarded it to the wrong person? Have you ever backed up confidential financials to a CD or DVD and then lost the disc? Would you like to put a timer on someone's ability to view the confidential information that you send so that after a certain date, it's no longer accessible?

The ability to protect data no longer in your control is something that security people have wanted for a long time. Microsoft responded with Rights Management Service (RMS). The RMS client integrates directly into Vista: If you're part of an RMS infrastructure, your applications can take advantage of this.

In this chapter, I discuss what RMS is and isn't; how RMS works in an environment; and finally, how RMS integrates with Vista applications so you can control how others use your data.

What Is RMS?

Rights Management Service is a back‐end solution in Windows that allows you to protect digital information after it's no longer in your control. For example, most people are familiar with a Portable Document Format (PDF) file — a protected document created and published with Adobe software. When an author creates a PDF, he decides what the reader can do with the file: reading ...