![]() | About restricting access with Information Rights Management |
Information Rights Management (IRM) allows individuals and administrators to set access permissions to documents, workbooks, presentations, and e-mail messages. This helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. After permission for a file is restricted by using IRM, the access and usage restrictions are enforced even if the file reaches unintended recipients. This is because the access permissions are stored in the document, workbook, presentation, or e-mail message itself. And these must be authenticated against the server.
IRM helps people to enforce their personal preferences for the transmission of personal or private information. IRM also helps organizations enforce corporate policy governing the control and dissemination of confidential or proprietary information.
More specifically, IRM helps do the following:
Prevent an authorized recipient of restricted content from forwarding, copying, changing, printing, faxing, or pasting the content for unauthorized use
Restrict content wherever it is sent
Provide file expiration so that content in documents can no longer be viewed after a specified time
Enforce corporate policies that govern the use and dissemination of content within the company
IRM can't prevent restricted content from being:
Erased, stolen, or captured and transmitted by malicious programs such as Trojan horses, keystroke loggers, and certain kinds of spyware
Lost or corrupted because of the actions of computer viruses
Hand-copied or retyped from a display on a recipient's screen
Digitally photographed (when displayed on a screen) by a recipient
Copied by using third-party screen-capture programs