To kick-off 2015 we’d like to talk with you about Information Rights Management. Let’s look at what this is and why we think it might be important to you. Information Rights allows you to safely send information and pre-determine what happens with it once you’ve sent it.
Let’s say you are bidding on a job with a potential client. You email in your bidding package. There’s probably a lot of proprietary information in that package. Depending on your business and the job, it might include drawings, specifications and a description of your methods. That’s information that you don’t want in the hands of your competition.
Let’s say you are a CPA firm and you need to send a document that contains personal information. You need to verify that it got to the person you intended and nowhere else.
Let’s say you are subject to HIPAA, PCI or SOX regulations and need to keep private information private.
Let’s say you are working with a contractor and you want them to have documents necessary to complete the job but you don’t want them to have then after the job is done.
Let’s say that you need to send some financial information to your bank or anyone really and you want to make sure that it remains private.
These are all cases where you could use information rights management. Information Rights Management allows you to determine what someone can do with the information that you are sending to them. It works within Outlook and Office and you can send protected information to anyone with a private email address. That means pretty much anyone in business. It will not work with aol, comcast, gmail and yahoo for example but it works for everyone else and they can even open the documents and still be subject to the restrictions you set on Apple and Windows mobile devices.
It’s very easy to use. You’ll set the permission for the document before you send it right from within Outlook or any other Office application like Excel or Word. You use the slider to give them permissions starting with only View and adding permissions all the way up to Co-Owner. You can also expire the content after which time they will no longer be able to open the file and choose whether or not you will allow them to view the document on their phone or other mobile device.
Here’s the best part, it’s FREE! The free version let’s any individual choose to use it or not. Subscribers to Office 365 or Premium RMS have additional features that include the ability to enforce the use of Information Rights Management for pre-defined types of data or to specific senders.
We’re standing by reading to introduce this technology to your staff. If you’d like to schedule a lunch and learn or add us to an upcoming staff meeting let us know and we’ll get you on our calendar.
– Amy
