Microsoft Information Rights Management

Information Rights Management (IRM) allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks, and presentations. This helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. After permission for a file has been restricted by using IRM, the access and usage restrictions are enforced no matter where the information is, because the permission to a file is stored in the document file itself.

IRM helps individuals enforce their personal preferences concerning the transmission of personal or private information. IRM also helps organizations enforce corporate policy governing the control and dissemination of confidential or proprietary information.

IRM helps to do the following:

• Prevent an authorized recipient of restricted content from forwarding, copying, modifying, printing, faxing, or pasting the content for unauthorized use
• Prevent restricted content from being copied by using the Print Screen feature in Microsoft Windows
• Restrict content wherever it is sent
• Support file expiration so that content in documents can no longer be viewed after a specified period of time
• Enforce corporate policies that govern the use and dissemination of content within the company