When you add the right people to the right tools, the result is business success. Not everyone would agree, however. Some people have argued that information technology (IT) has become a commodity so ubiquitous that it confers few advantages on businesses that invest in it. But these arguments focus on superficial measures of IT business investment such as total IT spending or the number of PCs per employee. As a result, they arrive at ambiguous and sometimes contradictory conclusions.

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• Access critical files and data when working remotely

• Receive instant notification of changes to shared files

• Quickly find information on their computers and the Web by using a single search tool

• Easily create customized intranets that feature a home page, a document library, and permissions that are unique to individual users

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The challenge
Employees working on business-critical projects require easy, secure access to information and files stored online in various formats. And when working away from the office or with colleagues in other locations, employees need a foolproof way to collaborate on and share documentation. They have to avoid inadvertently overwriting the contributions of their coworkers, which could cause confusion and jeopardize project deadlines. In addition, team members must be notified when someone who is working on the project changes a shared file. That way, everybody has the most up-to-date data.

Business scenario
The Baldwin Museum of Science, a not-for-profit organization, has received a small grant from the Canadian government to participate in microbiology research of deep Antarctic ice. Research teams from Belgium, Korea, and New Zealand will be contributing information to this study from laboratories around the world and from the field, in Antarctica. All teams that are working on the project must be able to access and keep current with data as it is changed or submitted. In addition, it is critical that breaking research stay confidential. Researchers and museum personnel are racing to beat competing researchers to publish their latest discoveries—and to get future grant money to continue their study. Because of the time constraints and limited funding, scientists need secure access to work around the clock from their respective offices, from the field, or from home. Whether they are using a desktop or laptop computer, scientists must be able to instantly retrieve word-processed documents, e-mail messages, spreadsheets, and slide presentations stored in various formats by their colleagues.

The solution
A solution based on Microsoft Office System and Microsoft Exchange Server can help your business teams collaborate more successfully and securely.

Equipped with familiar Microsoft Office productivity tools such as Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, your staff can better manage the wealth of information coming from a number of sources, in several formats. Microsoft Exchange Server works with Outlook to make messaging and collaboration more reliable and easier to manage. In addition, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server enables people inside and outside your organization to find, share, and publish information on a customized team Web site. Teams can use the version control and permissions capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint to protect sensitive data. And team members can personalize their views, get automatic notifications about data updates, and easily track document changes and workflow. Employees also can save time locating data on their computers by using the advanced search capabilities of Windows Desktop Search. By indexing the files and folders that are stored on a user’s PC, this powerful search tool helps users find nearly any document, e-mail message, appointment, or multimedia file that they need within seconds.

A solution comprised of Microsoft Office System, Exchange Server, and SharePoint Portal Server gives your employees:

• The ability to collaborate in real time. Securely and instantly share documents and data with coworkers and business partners, whether you are working at the office or from a remote location.

• One location for storing files. Use Document Workspaces to modify, access, and save documents in a central repository.

• Protection of sensitive information. Safeguard your files and folders from unauthorized distribution and modification.

• Version control. Receive alerts the moment someone on your team changes a shared document

Your customers and you share the same goal: You want your business to deliver value by satisfying critical needs efficiently. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools from Microsoft Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) enable your company to be that kind of business. Use familiar software solutions to help empower your employees to function at optimal productivity levels, to deliver high-quality services and responsive communications, and to obtain better results from your sales and service business. Microsoft Dynamics business software offers a wide spectrum of feature-rich, affordable CRM solutions to help you meet your specific needs.

Transform your business for consistent results
Microsoft Dynamics solutions can help extend the skills, processes, and tools you already own and use, and enable you to derive more value from existing investments. You can automate many routine and frequently occurring tasks, help reduce rekeying data and other busywork, and concentrate on making a difference for the business. Work the way you prefer to run your business—but with measurably increased results and tangible improvements across your processes and key relationships.

• The CRM solutions and capabilities within Microsoft Dynamics connect closely to other Microsoft technologies that you may already use. This brings together data, helping your sales people to answer customer questions without making the customer wait. Marketing planners can review the true results of marketing campaigns, from customer inquiries to sales and services delivered. Managers can use business data to assess the value of customer relationships for your organization and make them more productive.

• When your employees use the CRM functionalities of Microsoft Dynamics, they can work within familiar software environment, using tools they’re comfortable with. This helps reduce distractions of having to learn and work with disparate software tools. In the design process, Microsoft conducts extensive research with many thousands of customers. So the technology can do what people want it to do, in the way they want to see it. For example, you can access customer and business information and manage customer communications through your e-mail program. Or you can analyze data and create reports in your spreadsheet application.

• Your customers, as well as your employees, will appreciate that Microsoft solutions for CRM help make it possible to keep processes consistent and fast moving, and accountability high. Standardize customer relationship management along with communications, and satisfy expectations consistently. Make it easy, not just to find information, but to do something with it no matter what your role is—service associate or business executive.

Act on opportunities, and keep customers satisfied
Your sales, marketing, and service employees understand that they are tasked with realizing your ambitions. Every time they plan a marketing activity, engage with a customer, close a sale, or contact a prospect, they can either accomplish or miss the business goals. Microsoft solutions for CRM, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, help you enable your employees to be productive and successful—consistently and predictably.

• Sales people are always under pressure to make numbers and produce results. With Microsoft CRM and field-service solutions, you can provide your sales team with the intelligence they need to deliver. They can identify more potential opportunities, understand better what course of action to take, and convert more leads into satisfied customers. Streamlined communications and well-documented, consistent sales processes help keep everybody moving.

• You need your marketing group to proceed strategically as it uncovers and capitalizes on new opportunities. Microsoft Dynamics solutions can help give your marketing team the streamlined, automated tools to: Target the most promising market segments, bring your products and services to your audiences, convert possible leads into customers, and measure the results of all activities to drive even better results.

• Every time any of your customer-facing employees interacts with a customer or delivers a service, your business has an opportunity to strengthen customer loyalty, initiate up-sells and cross-sells, and build brand value. Microsoft Dynamics can help your services become profitable with effective communications, fast issue resolution, and efficient scheduling and dispatching of service delivery resources.

Microsoft Dynamics products and services for CRM
Microsoft Dynamics solutions are typically implemented for you by a Microsoft partner with the right industry and technical expertise. Implementations are painless and fast, enabling your business to continue without interruption. Your in-house technologists or Microsoft partner can customize the solutions and help to ensure they suit your requirements. Because the solutions require little continuous maintenance and have a low-adoption threshold with users, you can enable your IT staff to focus more on business-critical issues rather than on running technology.

Whether you run a small, growing business or a large organization with a high number of customers and large sales and marketing teams—you can use Microsoft Dynamics to help you manage relationships even better. Consider and choose from a variety of products.

By Elisabeth Goodridge

Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services and Information Rights Management Helps Protect Valuable Corporate Information No Matter Where It Goes

Confidential financial e-mail leaked to the press before the quarterly earnings call? A CEO’s first reaction may be to break out in a cold sweat. The second step may be to call the IT director to ask how the breach could have been prevented.

To help avoid this scenario, Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) with Office 2003 Professional Edition offers organizations a new layer of information protection technology by providing tools to control their business information, no matter where it goes.

With no single end-to-end corporate security offering, there is a definite need for these solutions, says Ray Wagner, an analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. “Microsoft raised the bar with this technology, as it helps IT managers meet business requirements,” he says.

Whether shared accidentally or intentionally, proprietary information sent to the wrong people can lead to a loss of revenue, competitive advantage or customer confidence. According to a 2002 survey of 130 companies by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. companies lost up to $59 billion in intellectual property and proprietary information from June 2000 to June 2001.

New federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and a growing reliance on digital information, are forcing responsibility of corporate content protection on IT personnel. Companies make business processes more efficient by shifting medical records, salary histories and other sensitive documents to digital formats, but the information is still vulnerable to malicious or accidental misuse.

Most digital information protection has been limited by available technology: Corporate firewalls, authentication technologies and encryption algorithms can restrict access to sensitive information but can do little to protect how this data is used or shared once access is granted.

“Many customers had internal rules and procedures regarding proprietary information, but no ability to enforce those rules,” says Jon Murchinson, a Microsoft RMS Communications Specialist. Organizations could only rely on employees’ judgment on who should see and use sensitive information.

Compounding the issue is the growing mobility of the information worker. With laptops and handhelds, employees increasingly view and use corporate intellectual property outside the company’s physical boundaries—from home offices, hotel rooms and even wireless hot spots at airports and coffee shops.

Creator Control

With policy enforcement tools and flexible administrative options, RMS with Office 2003 provides IT managers with the tools and infrastructure to enable persistent, file-level protection to Office documents across the organization. “The key work to RMS is ‘management’,” says Chris Le Tocq, an analyst with Los Gatos, Calif.-based Guernsey Research. “RMS links protection services with directory services, authenticating a class of people to use a class of documents.”

But the technology has to be easy to use, says Mike Meltzer, a product manager with Microsoft Office Information Worker Product Management Group. “People want something that works within their existing infrastructure. If it’s too difficult, they won’t use it.”

RMS enables Information Rights Management (IRM), a policy enforcement tool currently available with Microsoft Office Professional Edition Word 2003, Excel 2003, Outlook 2003 and PowerPoint 2003 applications. IRM provides the built-in functionality that allows users to apply these digital rights permissions.

For example, say a marketing executive wants the sales team to receive a highly confidential e-mail regarding the company’s new advertising campaign. In the Permission sub-menu of Outlook 2003, he selects a predefined “Highly Confidential” rights template, chooses his distribution list and appropriate access rights. Or he can select the new Permissions button on the toolbar to apply “Do Not Forward” rights to the e-mail.

On the backend, the RMS Server issues an Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML)-based publishing license to the document creator. If this is the first RMS activity for the executive, an XrML client licensor certificate is also issued to verify his identity and allow for future offline publishing.

With IRM functionality, the executive has control over whether recipients can print, copy or paste information or forward the e-mail to unintended users. The Windows print screen function is also disabled when a rights-protected document is open. The author can also set an expiration policy.

On the client side, IRM encrypts the data and locks in the usage rights into the document at the file level. When the recipient receives the e-mail, RMS validates the user’s credentials and usage rights. If those credentials are valid, then a use license is issued. An audit log records the file name, user name, date, time and whether the request was accepted.

The protection policies remain with the document regardless of whether the document is online or offline, or within or outside the corporate firewall.

Keys to Successful Deployment

Ease-of-use at the front end does not mean an onerous implementation at the backend. In addition to an RMS-enabled application, such as Office Professional Edition 2003, an RMS solution requires two main infrastructure components: Windows RMS for any edition of Windows Server 2003, and Windows RMS Client software, updated APIs for the Windows Desktop. Active Directory directory service and a database server, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine, are also required to authenticate users and store configuration data, respectively.

A significant aspect of an RMS deployment is determining corporate policy, says Bill Kilcullen, a principal consultant in the Microsoft Enterprise Services Practice at Plano, Texas-based EDS Corp. “Carefully planning what type of content needs to be protected is incredibly important to deployment,” he says. “There’s also time involved when considering who will have actual authorization to view and protect what content.”

Once policies are in place, deployment begins by adding and provisioning the RMS components and administrative console to Windows Server 2003. IT administrators then install and activate the Windows RMS client software on each client computer, and the RMS server acts as a proxy to acquire and then distribute a unique code to identify each client computer. Lastly, an administrator installs and activates RMS-enabled applications.

Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 is required to create, view and modify rights-enabled documents. However, these documents can be viewed and modified in Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003. Users who have prior versions of Office can view documents using a free HTML viewer, if they have the appropriate access rights.

Improved Management

With the RMS Administrator console, administrators can manage the RMS environment centrally, and defined individuals can have full control over all rights-controlled data.

IT managers can create revocation lists, audit trails and exclusion policies as well as roll back the entire system. This allows for “excellent damage control,” says Meltzer. “The audit trail, for example, gives you a view of who is accessing documents and who is attempting to access them.”

Similar to an end-user assigning rights in a Microsoft Office program, administrators can develop customized templates with predetermined access controls, for use in any RMS-enabled application and for use by the entire organization or specific company departments. “The templates for a legal or finance department are more granular than for customer service,” says Kilcullen.

RMS establishes the trust environment with the publishing and use licenses, and identification and account certificates. After verifying their identity with a NT or an appropriate authentication system, each user on the system obtains an account certificate from the RMS server for their specific computer. Before the user first publishes or views RMS-enabled e-mails or documents, user’s identity must be validated.

A New Layer of Corporate Security

No protection technology is completely secure, and RMS and IRM do not protect against employees reading confidential e-mails over the phone to an unauthorized person or social engineering attacks. The technology can however drastically reduce the chances of unauthorized users’ electronically receiving or viewing private business information.

“The ‘I accidentally viewed this stuff’ has been a great argument all along, but it will no longer work,” says Wagner.

Companies should continue to invest in corporate firewall and security technologies, says Marie Maxwell, Group Product Manager for Windows Rights Management Services. “But at the end of the day, the information worker can be the weakest link by forwarding an e-mail or document to an unauthorized person. RMS addresses that weak link by augmenting existing security technologies with another layer of protection,” she says. With encryption, data privacy remains intact, even if the user finds a way to mail the document