Active Directory Rights Management Services - AD RMS : new content

AD RMS Architecture Video Series: How AD RMS Works

tonytri — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:30:00 GMT

A successful deployment of Active Directory Rights Management Services depends on a careful consideration of how AD RMS works and how it interacts with other objects in your network environment. Enrique Saggese, a Senior Microsoft Consultant, recently gave a presentation about AD RMS design and deployment, which we are making available on TechNet Edge as a series of short videos.

In the first video in this series, Enrique describes the process and components that AD RMS uses to protect and consume IRM-enabled content.

Micah LaNasa, Technical Writer

Protecting a Microsoft Office Word Document with AD RMS

tonytri — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:21:00 GMT

Perhaps you are new to Active Directory – Rights Management Services and you have yet to see a demonstration of the technology. We recently posted a short screencast video on the Windows Server 2008 “How Do I?” Videos site that demonstrates a simple scenario where a user shares a protected Word document with another user in her organization. The purpose of the video is to give you an introduction to AD RMS by enabling you to see how it works in practice.

If you would like to go further in your understanding of AD RMS, you can view the following TechNet webcasts, geared toward an IT professional audience, that go into more detail about the product:

Microsoft’s AD RMS Rights Policy Templates

tonytri — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:41:00 GMT

Organizations using AD RMS often take advantage of rights policy templates to enable users to protect information according to a predefined set of rights. Many customers are asking us, what specific policy templates are used by the IT organization at Microsoft? Following are examples of the policy templates used by Microsoft’s IT organization:

Microsoft Confidential - This template uses the Microsoft All Staff distribution group. This group includes all Microsoft full-time employees (FTEs), contractors, and vendor staff. Any person not included in this distribution group, such as people outside the company, cannot open content protected through this template. This template provides the following rights: View, Reply, Reply All, Save, Edit, and Forward.
Microsoft Confidential Read Only - This template uses the Microsoft All Staff distribution group. This group includes all Microsoft full time employees (FTEs), contractors, and vendor staff. Any person not included in this distribution group, such as people outside the company, cannot open content protected through this template. This template provides the following rights: View.
Microsoft FTE Confidential - This template uses the Microsoft All FTE distribution group. This group includes only Microsoft full-time employees (FTEs). Any person not included in this distribution group, such as contractors, vendors, and people outside the company, cannot open content protected through this template. This template provides the following rights: View, Reply, Reply All, Save, Edit, and Forward.
Microsoft FTE Confidential Read Only - This template uses the Microsoft All FTE distribution group. This group includes only Microsoft full-time employees (FTEs). Any person not included in this distribution group, such as contractors, vendors, and people outside the company cannot open content protected through this template. This template provides the following rights: View.
Do Not Reply All – This template simply restricts recipients from using the Reply All function. This prevents large volumes of response traffic to messages sent to many recipients.

An end user can specify a rights policy template when she creates new content. This helps to ensure that she can easily comply with her organization’s information security policy. Rights policy templates are an important and commonly-used feature of AD RMS.

You can learn more about rights policy templates in the Microsoft TechNet topic, AD RMS Policy Template Considerations. This topic provides an overview of the technical considerations you must make when using AD RMS rights policy templates. It includes details about specific rights, template location, template distribution, scripting, and other information.

New Technical White Paper: Deploying AD RMS at Microsoft

tonytri — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:26:00 GMT

A technical white paper, Deploying Active Directory Rights Management Services at Microsoft, has recently been made available on TechNet. This white paper is the result of the collaborative effort of Microsoft’s consulting, user assistance, and internal IT organizations. Its purpose is to give you some visibility into the AD RMS deployment process and to help you learn from Microsoft’s own deployment experience.

The following brief excerpt summarizes the subjects covered:
Since the worldwide implementation of AD RMS at Microsoft, each day, an average of approximately 5,000 documents and e-mail messages are protected to be consumed by 80,000 unique users. These numbers continually grow as an increasing number of users adopt AD RMS technologies as their preferred means of helping to protect their confidential e-mail and documents.

This paper discusses the need that Microsoft IT had for protecting confidential business data, the reasons for deploying RMS over other possible solutions, and how AD RMS works. This paper also offers detailed lessons learned and best practices derived from the RMS server and client deployment and usage experience of Microsoft IT.

New Content: AD RMS Technical Reference

tonytri — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:35:00 GMT

The AD RMS team has recently published new content that details requirements and prerequisites for your AD RMS environment. They are the following:

AD RMS Prerequisites – Provides requirements and recommendations for setting up and configuring AD RMS in your environment. It includes information about certificates, DNS, hardware requirements, software requirements, and other topics.
AD RMS SQL Server Requirements – Provides a brief overview of the SQL Server databases used by AD RMS, hardware requirements for the database server, and software requirements for the database server.
AD RMS Firewall Considerations – Details how to configure your firewall for use with AD RMS.

We hope these guidelines prove to be valuable as you use them to plan for, deploy and configure AD RMS in your environment.

New Content: AD RMS and Active Directory Objects

tonytri — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:58:00 GMT

The AD RMS team has recently published new content that summarizes the required and optional AD DS user and computer objects for an AD RMS implementation.

The following abstract provides some details:
Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) is a Windows-based directory service. AD DS stores information about objects on a network and makes this information available to users and network administrators. For example, these objects can include user and computer accounts. AD DS is a requirement for installing and implementing AD RMS.

New Content: AD RMS Performance and Logging Best Practices

tonytri — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:56:00 GMT

The AD RMS team has recently published new content that details best practices for properly scaling and managing your AD RMS infrastructure.

The following abstract details the contents of this documentation:
Here we describe the scaling scheme for an AD RMS infrastructure, we define sizing parameters for the server roles in an AD RMS infrastructure, and we describe logging characteristics of AD RMS that enable adequate performance monitoring. We also present real-world data regarding Microsoft’s own production implementation of AD RMS in order to enable you to perform preliminary sizing estimates for your own infrastructure.

We hope these guidelines prove to be helpful to you as you configure your AD RMS environment.

New Content: AD RMS Client Deployment and Usage Considerations

tonytri — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:43:00 GMT

The AD RMS team has recently published new documentation that discuss best practices for managing your AD RMS client deployment.

The following abstract provides some details about the content:
Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) is an information protection technology that works with enabled applications to help safeguard digital information from unauthorized use. Content owners can define exactly how a recipient can use the information, such as who can open, modify, print, forward, or take other actions on the information.

AD RMS includes server-side technologies as well as client-side technologies. On the client, an RMS client must be in place, RMS enabled applications must be deployed and information protection policies and templates must be delivered.

In this paper we describe the best practices for safely and efficiently getting all those components in place on the client, as well as options for configuring the client in different scenarios.

New Content: Information-Rights-Management Architecture and Design Guidance for AD RMS Application Developers

tonytri — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:40:00 GMT

Bhushan Nene and Trent Swanson, architects on our Global Partner team, recently published a white paper that can give you insight into building applications that use AD RMS information rights management technology.

The following abstract details the contents of the document:
This white paper provides architecture and design guidance for building an Information Rights Management (IRM)-aware application using Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS). It presents a number of application patterns as well as best practices that you can use for developing IRM-aware applications. It covers basic consume and publish scenarios as well as complex federated scenarios that make use of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS). It makes extensive reference to the IRM Application Patterns Reference Implementation available for download at the MSDN Code Gallery.

We hope you find it to be helpful.