Two New Products Enforce Digital Rights Management on Intranets

InfoWorld's Mike Heck is out with a review of enterprise digital rights management products that can be used to control certain protected documents from prying eyes.

That'd be prying eyes, even on company Intranets.

Heck has tested Liquid Machines Document Control 6.0, and SealedMedia E-DRM 5.0.

"Liquid Machines´ Document Control enforces document access and usage policies, including open, read, save, and printing. A Policy Server, which integrates with AD (Active Directory) or LDAP, allows business users to centrally manage roles and policies; designated managers may also audit access and usage violations," Heck writes. O"n the client side, the Liquid Machines Policy Droplet plug-in enforces your policies -- and allows properly authorized users to modify rights."Heck likes this utilitiy's 65 file-format protection roster, as well as its policy-server agnostism. This means that LM can be installed either as a stand-alone or together with Microsoft's RMS (Rights Management Services). But the big difference between Document Control and RMS is that Document Control supports auditing, while -to quote old CB talk- that is a negatory on RMS.

Next, Heck writes about SealedMedia E-DRM 5.0. Here's what you need to know:

"This solution relies on a fundamental Context, which defines a group of documents, the people who can use the documents, and the roles those people can perform, such as opening, printing, or annotating documents," writes Heck. "This strategy allows you to set up a full-scale system and manage thousands of documents and users in short order -- typically a day or so -- which would be impractical if you had to attach rights to each document and user individually.

In his review, Heck adds that SealedMedia offers pre-configured Context roles and associated workflows suitable for Board Communications, Mergers and Acquisitions, Protecting Intellectual Property, Regulatory Compliance,as well as Secure Third-Party Collaboration.