Antony
Joined: 18 Jun 2002
Posts: 12725
Location: Sydney, Australia
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 05 Sep, 2003 3:57 am You can lock down your Office documents in Office 2003 |
[sdp=16940] |
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New features in Microsoft Office 2003, lock down your document.
| Quote: |  Office 2003, the upcoming update of the company's market-dominating productivity package, for the first time will include tools for restricting access to documents created with the software. Office workers can specify who can read or alter a spreadsheet, block it from copying or printing, and set an expiration date.
...
he new rights management tools splinter to some extent the long-standing interoperability of Office formats. Until now, PC users have been able to count on opening and manipulating any document saved in Microsoft Word's ".doc" format or Excel's ".xls" in any compatible program, including older versions of Office and competing packages such as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice. But rights-protected documents created in Office 2003 can be manipulated only in Office 2003.
"There's certainly a lock-in factor," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft would love people to use Office and only Office. They made very sure that Office has these features that nobody else has." |
(C|net)
More detail: New Office locks down documents (C|net, News.com)
In other words, to use this new feature, make sure you can afford new licenses for the whole department or company.
However, I must add, the information control in digital document has been available in Adobe Acrobat (PDF files) for years. For users with full Acrobat software, the disabling of copying contents or printing is nothing new. With Acrobat 5, digital signature can specify who has certain rights for such documents, such as low/high quality printing, content copying, content changing, ... etc. (You need full version of Acrobat to create PDF documents and need Acrobat 5 (full) or Adobe Reader 6 to read digitally signed documents.)
Microsoft is now catching up this missing feature. And no, this is not an innovation from Microsoft.
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