How to remove IRM (RMS) provisioning from MOSS

Hey all. I asked one of my buddies from Microsoft Germany, Carsten Kinder, to write up a few issues we recently discussed for addition to this blog. So without further ado...

This is a guest post from Carsten. Usually I maintain the PKI blog but I also focus on RMS so that I’d like to share my knowledge in this blog as well.

If you have configure your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to be RMS enabled you may wonder how to remove the provisioning again. This can be especially helpful in test environments.

The solution to the problem is quite simple:

1. Logon to the MOSS Server

2. Use File Explorer or a command prompt to remove the following directories from the system:

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\DRM\Server\S-*

In File Explorer you have to set the option to show hidden files and folders. Otherwise you won’t see the Application Data directory when browsing the directory tree. It is very important that the …\DRM\Servers directory remains on the system. Only remove the content of the …\Servers directory but not the directory itself!

3. As a next step, run iisreset to restart the MOSS web application. In case of a production environment, this must be done during maintenance hours ;-)

Once you have completed the above steps, you can start over to provision the MOSS server in the MOSS central administration again. The IRM provisioning is found under the Operations tab in the Security Configuration section. In case the RMS server need to be specified manually, select Use this RMS server and type https:// followed by the RMS server host or fully qualified domain name. A successful provisioning can be verified by looking into the directory mentioned above. If there is a new folder named with the SID of the MOSS service account, MOSS should work well with RMS.