SharePoint MetaData and Classification

SharePoint Security Paper: Harness the Power of Claims to Protect Information

The topic of claims, or trusted user attributes, is an established and well defined concept within the
identity management space. In SharePoint 2010, Microsoft introduced support for a claims-based identity model. Claims-based identities can be used in Microsoft SharePoint to enhance the process of user authentication. By harnessing the power of claims and extending its use to authorization, organizations can also effectively manage security and governance policies for accessing valuable information assets. It is important to
understand the many concepts of the claims-based identity paradigm in order to implement granular,
scalable and dynamic security within Microsoft SharePoint.

Organizations can implement and effectively leverage user claims in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to securely share sensitive information. By implementing claims-based authorization in SharePoint and leveraging the benefits of trusted user attributes, organizations can solve many of the security challenges they face in their collaboration and file sharing environments. Further, it becomes evident that in order to properly manage security and fully realize the potential of claims, organizations must have solutions that automatically enforce access control and security policies on all of their SharePoint content.

This new white paper describes how organizations can implement and effectively leverage user claims in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to securely share sensitive information.  Download the “Harness the Power of Claims to Protect Information” white paper, or go to our webpage, and learn how you can successfully implement claims-based authorization across all the SharePoint content in your organization.

Feedback from the SharePoint conference

I've heard nothing but great reports from the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. Sounds like it was a very valuable event for both users and vendors, and I wish I could have been there!

While Charlie recovers from his post-show weekend in Vegas, I'm going to write a couple of the blog entries for this week. I thought this would be a good time to review the SharePoint products that Titus Labs offers, since the blog has new readers from the conference.

The feedback I've heard is that two of our products in particular generated a lot of interest at the show:

1) Titus Labs Metadata for SharePoint: This product lets you easily control access to SharePoint documents based on metadata. With this method, you can provide item level security without having to set up permissions for individual documents. Military and government customers in particular find this useful because it lets them balance the needs of information protection with information sharing (the topic of a blog post later this week).

2) Titus Labs PDF Control for SharePoint: This product automatically converts Office documents in SharePoint to PDF. This is great when you want some people to have access to the original Office version, and others to have access only to the PDF. It's also very useful if you need to convert Office documents to PDF for archiving.

There was also lots of interest in our free Document Converter for SharePoint promotion. This product lets you automatically convert Office 97-2003 format documents to Office 2007 format, including bulk conversion. Charlie and the team also answered many questions about our Document Marking for SharePoint product, which adds watermarks and classification markings to Office documents.

We'll soon have more exciting news to share about new SharePoint releases due out this winter. Charlie has been working with many customers to gather feedback about enhancements and new features, and I'm sure he has more ideas after attending the conference. We're also looking forward to hearing his thoughts on SharePoint 2010, so stay tuned for more posts on that in the coming weeks.

-Lara

Using PDF in SharePoint Document Libraries

On Tuesday’s blog, we talked about limiting a user’s access to read-only when opening an Office document from SharePoint.  As mentioned, Microsoft Office read only support is weak.  Anyone can do a “Save As” on the document and change the content.

Generally if people want to put something in a read-only format they convert to PDF.  You can’t change the document, and depending on the settings of the PDF, you may not even be able to copy the text out of the PDF.  PDF is also the accepted standard for archived documents.  Documents that are scanned for records retention are usually scanned into a PDF format as that is the accepted format for archiving. 

If you’ve got a SharePoint portal and want to share documents with customers or partners, or you want to share documents with other employees that should only have read-only, how do you get the document in PDF format in SharePoint?  For example, the legal department may be creating contracts for use by other employees in the organization.  The lawyers need access to the original Microsoft Word format in order to be able to modify the contract, but other employees should only get the contract in PDF format.  One alternative is to have the lawyers PDF the document on their desktop every time there is a change to the document. They could then save the PDF to the SharePoint library. The problem here is that every employee would have to have PDF conversion tools on their desktop, and this could be a very time consuming process to have to maintain the PDF.

A product we have developed, called Titus Labs PDF Control for SharePoint solves this problem by automatically creating PDF versions of Microsoft documents as the documents are added to SharePoint. The PDF conversion takes place transparently in the background, and requires no additional software on the user’s desktop. If the source document change in the future, the PDF is updated automatically; this ensures that the PDF version is always up to date.

The software is administered via SharePoint Information management policies.  The PDF policy can be turned on for particular libraries.  Administrators can control the permissions on both the source document and PDF in SharePoint, so that some users can access the original documents, while others can see only the PDF.

 

 Once the policy is enabled,   PDF will be automatically created for all Office documents saved or uploaded into the library.  In the screenshot below, a PDF has been automatically created in the Administrative Documents library for all the saved Office documents.

Depending on the permissions of the users, they will either see all of the documents, or they may only see the PDF versions of the document.  The screenshot below shows a user who only has permissions to the PDF versions in the same Administrative Documents library.

Limiting Access to Read Only in SharePoint Document Libraries

Limiting Access to Read Only in SharePoint Document Libraries

We often hear from customers that they want to allow customers or partners access to documents via a SharePoint portal.  They want to be able to share final documents with this audience, and typically they don’t want people to be able to change the documents.  Read only versions of Microsoft Office documents are a possibility here, but there are some definite disadvantages.  First let’s have a look at how Read Only access would be setup in SharePoint

First we modify the permissions of the library, or the document itself to give Read-Only access.  In this case, a specific user – Charlie – has been granted read only access to the document called Acquisition Plan.

 

When the user Charlie signs on to the library and selects the menu of options for the Acquisition Plan document  in order to see what permissions they have, they will see a very limited set of permissions.  Note the user does not see the “Edit in Microsoft Office Word” option.

The user can still click on the document and open the document in Read Only mode. Note the (Read Only) beside the document name in Microsoft Word.

Though the user cannot modify this copy of the document, the user can do a “Save As” on this document and save the document with a different name.  The user can then modify the document as they wish.

All the Microsoft Office applications work in the same way.  As a result, most customers are not satisfied with the “Read Only” mode of Microsoft Office applications. Customers would prefer to distribute a document in a Read Only mode that cannot be modified. 

Later this week in our next post we’ll examine some alternatives to the Microsoft Office Read Only mode.