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Announcement: Azure RMS Documentation Library Update for December 2015

Azure Information Protection Team's avatar
Sep 08, 2018
First published on CloudBlogs on Dec 29, 2015

Hi everybody

As per Carol’s introduction post , she's letting you know what's new and hot in the docs for this month.

Reminders: Follow us on twitter ( @TheRMSGuy ) and join in our RMS peer community at www.yammer.com/AskIPTeam .

Happy New Year!

Dan (on behalf of the RMS team)

The Documentation Library for Azure Rights Management has been updated on the web and the latest content has Updated: December 1, 2015 (or later) at the top of the page.

Summary of the documentation available: Getting Started with Rights Management | Configuring Rights Management | Using Rights Management | Administering Rights Management by using Windows PowerShell

Plus, the Rights Management sharing application guides ( admin guide and user guide ) and FAQs (for Windows and mobile platforms ).

As we wrap up 2015, it's been a quieter time for the RMS team as many of our hard-working folks take a well-earned break. But that doesn't mean doc updates stop entirely. We have the perfect New Year offering for you if you're using this quieter time to plan for next year:

When you click this link, you'll see this new page in the Azure Rights Management documentation library isn't the actual guide but an introduction to what this guide is and a link to download it (Word or PDF format) from the Microsoft Download Center. This guide is downloadable only, because it contains not only administrator instructions, but templates for end user documentation.  You must copy, paste, and edit the end user documentation to suit your environment and business requirements.

We called this documentation a "rapid deployment guide" because it offers a menu-like list of scenarios that customers tell us offer a lot of business value when Azure Rights Management is configured with complementary technology solutions.  For example, a practical implementation of Rights Management with SharePoint libraries, with Exchange transport rules, and with Windows file servers.  You can choose just one scenario to get going quickly with Azure RMS, and then choose to either expand it further, or move on to the next scenario. The full list of scenarios in this first release are:

  • Safely email an Office file to users in another organization with the ability to track the resulting access (business-to-business collaboration). Examples:
    • Send a price list, roadmap, or release plans to a customer
    • Send a work order, or marketing specification to a vendor
    • Send a tender or request for quotation (RFQ) to a partner
  • Ensure documents stored in a SharePoint library remain under your control. Examples:
    • Departmental spreadsheets and reports
    • Cross-team collaboration for design documents or other deliverables
  • Executives can securely exchange privileged information over email. Examples:
    • Sharing acquisition plans
    • Discussing or disseminating legal issues
    • Information about potential layoffs or other sensitive subjects
  • Automatically protect all files on a file server. Examples:
    • CAD documents that must be kept in-house to prevent loss of intellectual property
    • Marketing promotion plans and dates that must be kept secret from public disclosure to maintain a competitive advantage
  • Tightly protect your most confidential, high-business impact documents. Examples:
    • Recipe or formula information that is unique to your company
    • Highly classified takeover or merger plans
    • Natural resources exploration data
  • Securely send company-confidential emails and attachments. Examples:
    • Company vision statement
    • Organization charts, reorganization news, or promotion announcements
    • Company policy information
  • Apply persistent protection for Office files in Work Folders. Examples:
    • Locally edited Word documents for a company-confidential project
    • Locally created spreadsheets that contain sensitive data or high business impact data
    • Locally stored work-in-progress PowerPoint presentations that must not be leaked or accidentally shared with people outside the organization until the presentations are final

As hinted, we plan to build on this list, as we get more feedback from people what they would find useful, and as more technologies embrace Rights Management to help protect your data.

This guide represents a lot of work behind the scenes during 2015, with many customer discussions, and lots of testing/validation. If you were one of these people, give yourself a pat on the back in being instrumental in bringing about this new guide!

Listening to our customers and consultants in the field, we learned that organizations were convinced that they needed to start protecting their data (good!), and we heard confirmation that enabling Rights Management in the cloud was no longer the deployment hurdle it used to be with RMS on-premises (also good!). But after Rights Management was activated, people often didn't know where to start - which application or service they should configure for Rights Management first, which of the many options they should be using, and what to tell end users.  So while TechNet still has all the detailed technical information, this guide focuses on discrete solutions that have a practical business purpose.  For example, in this guide you'll see a set of instructions for enabling executives to securely exchange privileged information over email rather than "How to configure Azure Rights Management with Exchange" and then you have to work out when and how to use this configuration, and which options to select.

For each scenario, we list the requirements that must first be in place (with a link to TechNet if you need to configure these), then the prescriptive administrator instructions, and then the template for suggested end user documentation (with an example of how the final instructions might look after your customizations).  Based on experience, our recommendation for end user documentation is to make the information as specific and relevant as possible, which is why customization is needed and we provide instructions and tips how to do this. For many of the scenarios, there isn't specific step-by-step instructions that end users have to do, because the data protection is applied automatically by administrators.  But end users still need information about what to expect and why they might see changes in their usual workflows.

As our release of this rapid deployment guide shows, we value customer feedback and try to incorporate it when possible.  Although we can't promise to make the docs perfect for everybody, we are committed to continual improvement.  If you have any feedback about the rapid deployment guide or the other docs for the RMS sharing application or for Azure RMS, email AskIPTeam@Microsoft.com .

What's New for the RMS Sharing Application Documentation, December 2015

The following information lists the topics that contain significant changes since the last update (September 2015).

Rights Management sharing application: Version release history

- Updated for fixes and new functionality in the December release.

Rights Management sharing application administration guide

- Updated the Supported file types and file name extensions table to include files that have a file name extension of .tif will be renamed .ptif. Support for files that have a file name extension of .tiff remain the same.

Rights Management sharing application user guide

- Updated Download and install the Rights Management sharing application to remove the requirement that you have to be local administrator to install the sharing application. Added a new section about limitations for standard user installs if you are using Office 2010.

What's New in the Documentation Library for Azure Rights Management, December 2015

The following information lists the single topic that contains a significant change since the last update (November 2015).

Deploying the Azure Rights Management Connector

- Update to the Configuring a SharePoint server to use the connector section, for the newly released MSIPC 2.1 client (1.0.2004.0). The version previously released stopped working in this scenario and was replaced with this version.

Published Sep 08, 2018
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