Open Text has announced Rights Management Services (RMS) for its 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 email, 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 organizations augment their security strategies by providing persistent protection that remains with information no matter where it goes.

"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," said 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 email," "do not print" or "do not save locally." The application then encrypts the content and the publishing license 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 organizations 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 organization.

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, organizations 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 U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and similar regulations around the world.

The Open Text RMS solution takes advantage of the widely used Active Directory Rights Management Service from Microsoft, the technology platform for rights management available with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Open Text is also partnering with both GigaTrust (http://www.gigatrust.com/index.shtml) and Liquid Machines (http://www.liquidmachines.com/), 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.