More on IRM

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0221microdetai2.html
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109481,00.asp
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2003-02-25-a.html.

Interesting stuff. There's a lot of things in the Office System 2003 suite that make it fairly obvious why they aren't making this backward compatible to run on Win 98 or NT. The security feature is one of them. It's obvious that without the Right's Management Server none of this stuff makes any sense, and if you're going to put out something like RMS, it needs to go on the most secure platform you can possibly have. There's not a lot of sense in going back to NT Server because you're going to have to gut some of the security features just to make it compatible with old code. That's silly. It only makes sense to run this on 2003 Server, where you can get the full functionality.

On the other hand, it also makes all this stuff a lot more expensive to upgrade to. It'll be interesting to see how many do. I would think that companies that need to have extremely strong information security would want to upgrade and use all of this, but the rest of us? We'll see.
posted 11:24 AM | 0 comments | Links to this post

Inconsistent

I just added two comments to my other blog. All new comments get emailed to me, even the one's I leave. One of the comments got junked, one did not. They both have the same exact header information and subject. Both have just text in the message, a link to my blog and a timestamp. Strange...
posted 8:48 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

Information Rights Management

I downloaded the little piece that allows me to use IRM on Office documents and Outlook messages. According to the details, there's quite a bit involved in this whole thing. (Can you just imagine the support calls that will be generated when people get an email message and find they can't print it or forward it? *L*)

Anyway, in order to use it you need to have access to a right's server, which stores the credentials (not the files). I'm not sure if, in release, the right's server is something you're going to have to have to use this service or if MS will be providing an online version. In the beta they offer a free trial version of the online server. I don't get the impression that will continue past the beta expiration date.

And yes, you need to have a .Net Passport account to sign up for the free trial. :)
posted 10:23 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

OneNote as outliner

I published my outline of notes as a "single-file" web page. (MHTML) It's not a bad way to do some outlining and get the outline published out to the web, especially if you're outlining something like external links. I've definitely seen worse ways. :)

There's no way to collapse and expand your outline, so there's also better ways to accomplish this, but if you're looking for a quick list, or quick notes published as a web page, this does work pretty well. Really isn't the idea of OneNote all about just doing things quick and dirty? :)
posted 9:50 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

Note to self

According to the System Requirements. Office 2003 will only run on Windows 2000 or XP. (Probably server 2003 also although that's not listed on the beta, probably because it wasn't available yet?) That's going to mean an upgrade of our OS, as we are still using mostly NT 4.0 at work. I think it's going to be helpful to upgrade to XP before the upgrade to Office, if we decide on upgrading. We are going to need time for people to get used to XP before tossing the new version of Office at them as well.

Plus the expense of upgrading the OS needs to be considered as part of the overall expense of moving to Office System 2003. (Not that I don't think we should look at upgrading the OS regardless of what I find with Office, XP is that much better than NT.)

Of course involved in that will be decisions about hardware upgrades as well. Is Pentium 3 733Mhz, 128MB RAM and 10GB HD going to be enough for us to still be using on the desktop 3-4 years down the road? Will it even be enough to run XP and Office 2003 efficiently? Lots of questions...
posted 10:55 AM | 0 comments | Links to this post