With regulatory compliance issues impacting organizations of every size and in every market, reducing the risk that confidential information will fall into unauthorized hands requires IT to revisit document-level encryption. In the absence of Windows Rights Management Services, document encryption via Office is a management burden.

When to Secure at the Document Level?

Securing content at the document level on a regular basis is unnecessary for documents that are managed by enterprise systems that employ access controls to content repositories, such as file systems and document management systems. However, when a document leaves the control boundaries of these systems, for example during routing to a party outside of the enterprise, it is impossible to control use of the document without extensive certificate-based public key infrastructures (PKI).

Document-Level Security Support in Microsoft Office 97-2003 Format

Microsoft Office supports three categories of document-level security, which can be deployed at the client level...