In case you missed it, Alan Pelz-Sharpe (Research Director, Content Management and Collaboration at 451 Research) and our own Antonio Maio (Senior Product Manager, TITUS) hosted a great webcast titled: Key Strategies to Effectively Govern and Secure Sensitive Data in SharePoint 2013. There were a lot of great tips in the webcast, but there is one item that captured most of the participant’s attention: automating security and policies. Since managing security in SharePoint is a manual process, it is very difficult to consistently enforce the ever-changing security and policy requirements across all content. Our participants had a lot of great questions about how TITUS can help to enable automation.
Before we get into the participants’ specific questions, let me quickly review what Titus SharePoint Security can do to help automate SharePoint Security enforcement. Fully integrated with SharePoint, administrators can set fine-grained policies that use metadata to authorize or deny a user’s access privileges to specific information. In addition, TITUS’s solutions can help to raise user awareness and accountability when handling the information by applying classification headers, footers and watermarks. These markings also promote accountability by applying the user’s name and a time stamp to downloaded and exported materials.
Our main website contains a great deal more information about the TITUS SharePoint Security solutions, but a review of the webinar questions can provide a different perspective than what is typically found in our marketing materials.
Q: Can TITUS apply policies to existing content?
A: Yes, TITUS applies the policies to all existing or imported content.
Q: How does TITUS administer policies across my SharePoint system?
A: TITUS can set up policies at the site collection
level and all information contained within that site collection will
follow these default policy and security settings. However, where
needed, administrators can also set rules for specific sub-sites,
libraries and lists. These specific rules will trump the site rules,
ensuring the necessary security is always enforced.
Q: Aren’t there native document mark-up options within SharePoint?
A: Partially, but only in SharePoint 2010. SharePoint
2010 did provide some limited ability to add labels to the top of Word,
Excel and PowerPoint documents when the document was opened into the
native application. So, a user could choose or be prompted to add a
label, such as “Confidential” to the top of a document they were
editing. However, there are several limitations, including the lack of support for watermarks, it is limited to just MS Office files and there is no bulk labeling.
In SharePoint 2013, all native SharePoint labelling options have been removed.
In contrast, with TITUS Document Policy Manager for SharePoint, headers, footers and watermarks are applied to Microsoft Office documents and PDF documents automatically according to the polices established by the administrator.
Q: Can TITUS apply security on specific content types?
A: Yes. SharePoint itself does not support setting
permissions on content types. More specifically, with native SharePoint
capabilities you cannot configure permissions to be set on all instances
of a particular content type like an “Expense Report”. Permissions can
only be assigned to securable objects like items and documents (or any
content type derivation of those) and to containers like folders,
documents sets, libraries, lists, sites and site collections.
TITUS Metadata Security for SharePoint can set permissions on items and documents (and any derivation of those) automatically based on the content type of each item. For example, when configuring policies in TITUS Metadata Security, you can include conditions like “if ContentType = Expense Report” and have unique permissions assigned only to items of those specific content types.
Q: How long is your trial version and do you provide support during the trial?
A: TITUS’ standard trial is 15-days during which you will receive assistance from a TITUS sales engineer.
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