This blog is the start of a series of articles I will write over the next few months on how to ensure that your data is encrypted and secured to only the people you want to access it, and only for the level of rights you want to give them.

The technology that we will look at to do this is Microsoft’s recently released Windows Azure Active Directory Rights Management product, also known as AADRM or Microsoft Rights Management, or “the new RMS”.

In this series of articles we will look at the following:

• What is Rights Management (this article)
• Turning on Azure Active Directory Rights Management
• Managing Azure Active Directory Rights Management
• Enabling and Configuring AADRM in Exchange Online
• Enabling Microsoft Rights Management in SharePoint Online
• Creating Microsoft Rights Management Templates and Policies
• Configuring Exchange On-Premises to Use AADRM (the RMS Connector)
• Configuring Exchange On-Premises to Use AADRM
• Configuring SharePoint On-Premises to Use AADRM
• Using Microsoft Rights Management from Microsoft Office
• Using Microsoft Rights Management to protect anything/everything else

The items above will get lit up as the article is released – so check back or leave a comment to this post and I will let you know when new content is added to this series.

What is “rights management”

Simply this is the ability to ensure that your content is only used by whom you want it to be used by and only for what you grant. Its known in various guises, and the most common guise is Digital Rights Management (DRM) as applied to the music and films you have been downloading for years.

With the increase in sharing music and other mp3 content in the last ten plus years, the recording companies and music sellers started to protect music. It did not go down well, and I would say this is mainly because the content was bought and so the owner wanted to do with it as they liked – even if what they liked was legal they were limited from doing so. I have music I bought that I cannot use because the music retailer is out of business or I tried to transfer it too many times. I now buy all my music DRM free.

But if the content is something I created and sold, rather than something I bought I see it very differently. When the program was running I was one of the instructors for the Microsoft Certified Master program. I wrote and delivered part of the Exchange Server training. And following the reuse of my and other peoples content outside of the classroom, the content was rights protected – it could be read only by those who I had taught. Those I taught think differently about this, but usually because the management of getting a new copy of the content when it expires!

But this is what rights management is, and this series of articles will look at enabling Azure Active Directory Rights Management, a piece of Office 365 that if you are an E3 or E4 subscriber then you already have, and if you have a lower level of subscription or none at all you can buy for £2/user/month and this will allow you to protect the content that you create, that it can be used by only those you want to read it (regardless of where you or they put it) and if you want it can expire after a given time.

In this series we will look at enabling the service and connecting various technologies to it, from our smartphones to PC’s to servers and then distributing our protected content to whom needs to see it. Those who receive it will be able to use the content for free. You only pay to create protected content. We will also look at protecting content automatically, for example content that is classified in a given way by Windows Server or emails that match certain conditions (for example they contain credit cards or other personally identifiable information (PII) information such as passport or tax IDs) and though I am not a SharePoint guru, we will look at protecting content downloaded from SharePoint document libraries.

Finally we will look at users protecting their own content – either the photographs they take on their phones of information they need to share (documents, aka using the phones camera as a scanner) or taking photos of whiteboards in meetings where the contents on the board should not be shared too widely.

Stick around – its a new technology and its going to have a big impact on the way we share data, regardless of whether we share it with Dropbox or the like or email or whatever comes next.