Open Text Corporation, the pre-eminent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, today announced Rights Management Services (RMS) for the Open Text ECM Suite, which allows enterprises to safeguard confidential and sensitive information from unauthorised uses for content, even after it leaves the secure vault of the content repository.
High-profile public and private sector cases of information misuse, IP theft and privacy leaks over the past few years have been due in part to the ease of distributing electronic information via e-mail, flash drives and other means.
Even though the content may be stored in a secure repository, once users have the right to read a document and save it on their local drives, the content becomes vulnerable.
Open Text Rights Management Services lets organisations augment their security strategies by providing persistent protection that remains with information no matter where it goes. Rights Management Services gives users control over who accesses their content and how, and ensures that the right version is being used.
"With the speed that information travels, it's all too easy for sensitive documents to get forwarded or downloaded to a USB drive and land in the wrong hands," commented Lubor Ptacek, Vice-President of Product Marketing at Open Text. "Permissions-based security in an enterprise repository alone is not sufficient. By integrating Rights Management Services into the ECM Suite we are making it easy for customers to layer persistent content-based security on top of their current protection policies and procedures."
Rights Management Services works by enforcing content protection constraints for documents and other content based on business rules, such as 'do not e-mail', 'do not print' or 'do not save locally'. The application then encrypts the content and the publishing licence together. The content and rights remain encrypted during transport, extending security to wherever the content travels. When a recipient opens rights-protected content, a request goes to a rights management server to validate the user's credentials and usage rights. Round-trip scenarios are also supported, allowing editing and uploading of new versions that retain the rights management constraints.
Full integration with the Open Text ECM Suite allows organisations to quickly deploy Rights Management Services and easily protect any content asset stored in the Open Text Enterprise Library, or map file access policies to existing security levels. As a shared service in the ECM Suite, Rights Management Services are also available to any content application in the organisation.
Protection spans Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 applications as well as virtually all other file formats, including PDF, HTML, engineering drawing file formats, image files, ZIP, archives and more. Users can also read and protect content viewed on BlackBerry smartphones. As a result, organisations can secure and control their content no matter where it resides, and more fully comply with regulatory requirements that mandate information protection, such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and similar regulations around the world.
Proven technology core
The Open Text RMS solution takes advantage of the widely used Active Directory Rights Management Service from Microsoft, the industry's leading technology platform for rights management available with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.
"More and more organisations are seeing rights management as a critical part of their information protection strategies to protect against leaks and theft of confidential information. That's why we build this capability directly into our server platform," added John Chirapurath, Senior Director in the Identity and Security Business Group at Microsoft. "Open Text is providing advanced solutions on top of Active Directory Rights Management Services to help customers build what we call Business Ready Security into their enterprise content management and collaboration initiatives."
Open Text is also partnering with both GigaTrust and Liquid Machines leaders in extending the Microsoft RMS platform, to add support for specialty content types such as computer-aided design (CAD) files, Visio, Adobe PDF, graphic files, and many other file formats, plus rights management support for documents available via BlackBerry devices.
"With the addition of GigaTrust's Protector for the Open Text platform, information control can be applied and managed in a variety of ways to meet the needs of different industries or different business functions that use varied file formats no matter where the content travels," continued Darryl Worsham, Vice-President of Business Development and Partner Products at GigaTrust.
"Liquid Machines and Open Text are providing customers with a solution that covers the majority of file types in an enterprise. With the integrated solution, our joint customers can persistently protect their most critical intellectual property in electronic form, regardless of where it travels. Rights management policies can be applied automatically and consistently to all types of enterprise content throughout its life cycle," concluded Ed Gaudet, Senior Vice-President of Corporate Development and Marketing of Liquid Machines.
For further information, please contact Rob Shaw: tel +27 83 626 3811, fax +27 86 646 4178, e-mail rshaw@opentext.com.
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