Enterprise DRM Back to the Fore

Computerworld - The CIO called me into his office recently to show me something. I’ve learned that when he wants to show me something, I should be prepared to spend some long nights at work. That’s what happened this time as well.

What he wanted to show me was related to digital rights management. I have mentioned before that I have tried to deploy enterprise rights management to protect our company’s intellectual property. With DRM, one can encrypt a document and then “wrap” it in a digital envelope that applies certain permissions or policies to it. Permissions can be as simple as a list of authorized recipients, and policies can do things like restrict the recipients’ ability to copy and paste, save, print or send.

My initial attempt at deploying DRM was not very successful. As the project manager, I had defined most of the requirements, researched vendors and selected a single vendor to conduct a pilot. I had even gone so far as to have a Solaris server configured, and all that was left to do was to obtain the rights management server software. But then funding for the project was “deferred.” That was just a nice way of telling me it had been cut.

I still haven’t seen any funding. When I was hired here, I was told that protecting intellectual property was a priority, so you would expect executives to be excited about deploying DRM. It’s quite funny, actually, when I think about the countless hours I’ve spent researching and conducting project management meetings for various initiatives that have never received funding. I don’t mind doing the work; I always learn something, since most initiatives involve either new and emerging technologies or something I’ve deployed in the past but need a refresher on.

As the manager, though, I have to be careful not to get too involved in projects, since I have a department to run and don’t have time for things like configuring servers. That was thrown to the side, however, when the CIO called me in.

He had spent the previous evening playing around with the Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) client and demonstrated it to me using his Microsoft Passport. Passport, now called Live ID, was designed as a universal log-in service. It’s supposed to let users log into many Web sites using one account, though it has never really caught on. But RMS can use Live ID as a valid credential to encrypt and verify a user’s association with a document or some other electronic content. My CIO was so excited, he wanted to set up a demonstration for a group of executives on the Intellectual Property Protection Steering Committee. His idea is that if he can convince them that RMS is a worthwhile technology, they will fund an initiative to revisit DRM.