Microsoft Tungsten To Take On Digital Rights Management

Somewhat surprisingly, the server is coming out of the company's Productivity and Business Services unit, the entity headed by group vice president Jeff Raikes and best known for Microsoft Office, the company's Information Worker initiative. The bulk of Microsoft's server software,Content Management Server, Commerce Server and BizTalk Server, originate in the .Net Enterprise Server group. Raikes' group does own Sharepoint Portal Server, however.

Some sources close to the company were not bullish on the product's provenance. "The fact that it's coming out of the Office group means it will probably fail as a server," said one source close to Microsoft.

A Microsoft insider confirmed the timing of the planned rollout and insisted the product's derivation makes sense because of that team's document-creation focus.

A spokeswoman said it is too early to discuss DRM technologies specifically but that Microsoft is committed to developing DRM solutions that protect content and personal privacy. She noted that several music and video subscription services already use Windows Media DRM but that the need to protect content extends beyond music and movies.

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At Comdex Fall earlier this week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates spoke of DRM as one technology area, along with security and privacy protection, that need a lot more work.

One partner source said Microsoft continues to talk about providing both a DRM server and DRM Web services. Theoretically, such rights-management technology would allow a document's author, or an administrator, to set different security levels for different document components. A user could forward a document, or a song or any content, to a colleague and if the recipient wanted to open the file, the content's originator could charge a fee, for example.

But, the source said, "right now DRM itself is embryonic. The problem is that rules for viewing and editing documents are not enforced as the documents are routed from party to party. If a document starts out with pieces for only marketing to see and pieces only for technical people to see, those rules are not applied again down the routing chain." Federal rules, including HIPAA, are requiring that kind of capability. "You have to enforce security across the whole process," he noted.

CRN first reported on Microsoft's DRM game plan last March. (See related story.) At that time, CRN reported that Microsoft was developing a DRM platform dubbed ePub.Net to enable businesses and customers to distribute and exchange content, including Office documents, in transactions over the Web.

IBM already offers Electronic Media Management Systems, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This software can secure structured or unstructured data formats. IBM is in the midst of rearchitecting that offering around common J2EE componentry and will host those services on IBM Content Manager, said Janet Perna, general manager of IBM Software's Data Management Group. Digital Rights Management "will be a WebSphere application," she said.

In addition, IBM just bought Tarian, an electronic records management company, and is branding those products IBM Records Manager. "If you look at regulated industries like finance and insurance, there are lots of regs around how long you have to keep documents, when you can destroy them. ... [With DRM you can set who can make copies, how many copies, if they can forward [documents," she noted. (See related story.)

Last April, Microsoft invested in ContentGuard, a Xerox spinoff specializing in software to protect and manage documents, music and other Web-distributed content. It promises publishers control over their material so a forwarded document, for example, might not be opened without a charge. Xerox and Microsoft agreed to push XrML as a standard for protected data exchange.