How to avid metadata misadventure
How to avid metadata misadventure
July 3, 2009:What steps can you take to avoid releasing data about yourself or the organisation you work for, by sending a simple Office document via email?
Beneath the apparently innocent letter or spreadsheet you have released into the wild lies a potentially catastrophic under layer of revealing metadata that contains information you may not wish to share with all and sundry.
Despite the many memorable examples of public figures that have come unstuck through accidental metadata, many still routinely attach a spreadsheet or presentation without realising the consequences. There is no more famous victim of this syndrome than former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. In 2003 a UK government dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organisations was released in Word format, after which it was learned that much of the material was actually plagiarised from a U.S. researcher on Iraq.
Switched-on companies can avail themselves of sophisticated network software that automatically strips this metadata from documents before they are sent, but in this day and age when we work from so many different locations, it is difficult to be sure you will always be protected by the watchful eye of your canny network administrator.
In Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), Microsoft has included a "Document Inspector" that allows you to manually remove metadata as it appears in each of the products.
Critics of Document Inspector claim its main weakness is the lack of automation. The onus is on individual users to “inspect” documents and then decide the metadata to remove, proving to be ineffective in enforcing a metadata policy throughout an organisation.
Metadata management software, on the other hand, removes metadata more thoroughly and is designed to help firms automate and therefore enforce metadata policies. The most popular products available for metadata management can be found by searching for “metadata management software” in Google.
Metadata Assistant available from DocsCorp is a product that integrates into MS Office applications to cleanse documents directly within the application, or it can run as a standalone application. It cleanses 19 different metadata types in Word, 24 metadata types in Excel,15 in PowerPoint and even removes metadata within a PDF. It can remove information you don't want circulated, such as the last 10 Authors, where the document was located on a PC/server, Track changes and comments.
Metadata Assistant integrates into email applications such as GroupWise, Lotus Notes and MS Outlook, along with integration into eDocs,WorkSite, Desksite and Worldox , to ensure that document metadata is analysed and removed from documents. This can be an automated process, or users can be prompted to act.
Alan Wheat, Product Manager at Docscorp says "Metadata is valuable because it allows us to classify and index documents and facilitates a fast and efficient retrieval. But this same metadata, if maintained within the document when sent externally to our workplace, can and has created professional embarrassment.“Our projects and tasks experienced by the majority of workers today are focused on targets and deadlines,” said Wheat.
"We have numerous software applications to perform our day to day tasks however there’s a lack of organizational awareness on how to automatically eliminate the disclosure of sensitive information.The ease, of which Metadata Assistant seamlessly cleanses documents of sensitive information, ensures that we don’t all have to become proficient metadata professionals."
Some of the companies that provide solutions to prevent any nasty metadata accidents include: www.docscorp.com – Metadata Assistant; www.beclegal.com - metadata reveal; www.esqinc.com - iScrub; www.workshare.com - WorkShare protect; and Docguardhttp://bidgoodsvcs.com/docguard/
Esquire Innovations offers a metadata management program for Microsoft Office documents, iScrub, that offers the ability to scrub e-mail attachments and a metadata reporting component.
3BClean scrubs the metadata from Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) files, Open Document Format (ODF) files, as well as generating PDFs.
3BOpenDoc is a scalable server based solution that cleans metadata from Open Document files. It can be configured via a set of rules to clean all email attachments that are inODF or Microsoft Office format prior to forwarding them on to the destination. The rules can be set up by user and/or group and can apply to emails going outside of your organisation and/or internally within your organisation. 3BOpenDoc can be integrated into your document management system (DMS) or content management system (CMS) and configured so that a document is cleaned or converted automatically at the time of import to or export from the system. The format of the document can be configured to be dependent on the state of the document in the system and the user who is exporting the document.