Rights Management Services

Windows Rights Management Services (also called Rights Management Services, Active Directory Rights Management Services or RMS) is a form of Information Rights Management used on Microsoft Windows that uses encryption and a form of selective functionality denial for limiting access to documents such as corporate e-mail, Word documents, and web pages, and the operations authorized users can perform on them. Companies can use this technology to encrypt information stored in such document formats, and through policies embedded in the documents, prevent the protected content from being decrypted except by specified people or groups, in certain environments, under certain conditions, and for certain periods of time. Specific operations like printing, copying, editing, forwarding, and deleting can be allowed or disallowed by content authors for individual pieces of content, and RMS administrators can deploy RMS templates that group these rights together into predefined rights that can be applied en masse.

The Rights Management Server debuted in Windows Server 2003, with client API libraries made available for Windows XP and Windows 2000 as well. Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 also support Rights Management Services. In Windows Server 2008, Windows Rights Management Services has been renamed to Active Directory Rights Management Services, reflecting a higher level of integration with Active Directory. The Rights Management Client is included in Windows Vista and later versions and downloadable for Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003.