Sent Back to the Dark Ages with DRM
Recently I was sent internal mail with a document attached that I was asked to review and provide feedback on. The mail and the document were sent with restricted permission. I can't help but wonder if this wasn't because I'm now seen as some sort of direct conduit to Slashdot through my blog. I've seen Scoble with an "I'm blogging this" shirt and I imagine that's how people see me now regardless of my attire.
The first thing I noticed, having seen this mail through our webmail service, was that I couldn't read the message or download the document on my home machine. Presumably this ensures that the assets only ever exist on machined within the walled garden of our corpnet. I do a lot of work from my couch at home so I was a little bummed, but found solice in just watching TV instead of being productive. It really didn't bother me much and I'm sure things are more secure that way.
Upon firing up Outlook the next day to open up the mail I'm forced to wait while Outlook pauses to connect to our rights management server... again, only a minor inconvenience, but I can't do anything else with outlook while this is happening. I'm hoping future versions of outlook do this in the background. Finally it opens and, half scared, I right click to "save as" on my desktop... thankfully this works and I'm able to open up multi-page document for review and I really haven't lost too much productivity.
I really like the comments and change tracking features in word. Together they beat the hell out of red ink and make writing and receiving document reviews a wonderfully digital experience. To bad I can't touch this document because I only have the right to read it on my screen. At this point I didn't know whether to be impressed that the rights management actually worked or frustrated that I would have to do this the old fashioned way.
No problem... I'll print this sucker and break out the red ink since I like to mark-up as I read. This is disabled as well. Allright... I'll reply to the DRM'd mail and cut/paste in the sections I want to comment on... denied. I spent at least a few minutes trying to figure out why Ctr-c -> Ctr-v was broken because clippy doesn't pop up to tell you "Hey, it looks like you'll have to paraphrase man!".
Thankfully I have dual monitors. I open up the document for viewing on one screen and a reply to the original mail in another. It took a lot longer than it should have, but I paraphrased and referenced the sections I had issues with and was unwilling to spend the time on minor tweaks to wording since it would have required much more typing that was really necessary. No hard figures, but I'd estimate I was at least 50% as productive in this task as I should have been. A simple "Hey, don't forward this" in the subject or e-mail body would have been enough for me. I can follow instructions just fine without Office restricting me. It's not like this was a top secret revenue forecast or something.
This wasn't just frustrating for me, I've since been asked if my boss and I could forward our replies to two additional people. The sender would have been able to do this themselves if the mails had not been restricted. I sent mine, but my boss is OOF so there will be a decent delay before the new guys get to see his response since I can't forward his restricted reply either.
Hey, I'm actually really impressed that this feature worked as it was intended to. Kudos to the Office team. I do, however, believe that the use of this feature should be carefully considered. In the scenario I described there was a serious loss of productivity for what I didn't consider to be a serious security gain. But hey, I did blog about it so maybe the paranoia is justified.
Comments
Anonymous
September 15, 2004
Does print-screen still work with the DRMed documents?Anonymous
September 15, 2004
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September 15, 2004
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September 15, 2004
Lazycoder weblog » Office DRMAnonymous
September 15, 2004
Printscreen didn't appear to work by default with the word document open. My favorite capture application though, snaggit, did a nice job of getting the pic. Then i could have even ran it through OCR software without much effort. :-)
To be clear... I think that this feature has merit and the office team should make sure it works as advertised for sharing very sensitive data. My point is more that, like any technology, the users should think about the implications of it's use. Dare's is another good example of a bad use.Anonymous
September 15, 2004
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September 16, 2004
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September 17, 2004
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September 19, 2004
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September 19, 2004
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September 20, 2004
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September 20, 2004
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September 21, 2004
I guess the difference is that different people have different beliefs over intellectual property. Any other item you buy will eventually wear out and you'll need to buy another. Well, because it is POSSIBLE with electronic media to never lose it if one continously makes backups/copies, people assume it is their right to forever have a copy of a digital work if they purchase it.
Should you? Perhaps. But since it's not your property to begin with, you don't really get to set the rules because it's not yours.Anonymous
September 22, 2004
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September 23, 2004
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September 21, 2005
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January 05, 2008
PingBack from http://boxing.247blogging.info/?p=3216Anonymous
April 04, 2008
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