Delete a Rights Policy Template
Applies To: Windows Server 2008
When you delete a rights policy template from the AD RMS cluster, content published using that template can no longer be consumed. As a best practice, you should back up the configuration database before deleting a rights policy template to ensure that you can recover rights-protected content if necessary.
An alternative to backing up the whole database is to archive the template that you want to stop using to add rights-protection to documents. Archiving a rights policy template will allow users to consume the content but not create new rights-protected content with the template. For more information about archiving templates, see Archive a Rights Policy Template.
For AD RMS clients that are not running Windows Server 2008, or clients for which the automatic rights policy template distribution has not been enabled, you must manually remove the rights policy template from a user's computer. If you do not remove the deleted rights policy template and someone uses it to publish content, AD RMS will not be able to issue any use licenses for the content, because it will not be able to locate the specified template in the configuration database.
Membership in the local AD RMS Template Administrators, or equivalent, is the minimum required to complete this procedure.
To delete a rights policy template
Log on to a computer in the AD RMS cluster.
Open the Active Directory Rights Management Services console and expand the AD RMS cluster.
In the console tree, click Rights Policy Templates.
Select the name of the rights policy template to delete, and then, in the Action pane, click Delete.
Click Yes to confirm the deletion.