SharePoint MetaData and Classification

Announcing: New Release of TITUS SharePoint Security Suite

We’re very pleased to announce the latest release of the TITUS SharePoint Security Suite! With this release, TITUS is making it easier than ever before to enhance and automate security within Microsoft SharePoint.

TITUS Security Suite for SharePoint version 3.2 enhances security by automatically enforcing fine-grained access control and applying visual labels – promoting strong, consistent data governance for SharePoint content. TITUS products leverage existing document metadata combined with trusted user claims to ensure that security is applied automatically and consistently across all SharePoint content. As Microsoft SharePoint becomes an increasingly critical platform for document and records management, administrators and content owners are faced with the challenge of protecting sensitive content and preventing data breaches. The TITUS SharePoint Security Suite ensures that content in SharePoint is protected automatically and consistently across all SharePoint content.

What’s New

The latest version of TITUS Security Suite for SharePoint is focused on making SharePoint a more secure platform for organizations while simplifying SharePoint security for administrators.  We’ve listened to our customers and put a lot of work into making it easier to manage security in large SharePoint environments.  Here’s a list of just a few of the great features that are new in the TTITUS SharePoint Security for SharePoint version 3.2:

• Dynamic Policies – enforce dynamic, fine-grained security in SharePoint with policies based on trusted user attributes (claims) and metadata. With TITUS dynamic policies, organizations can ensure that the right people are accessing the right information at the right time. Dynamic policies can be used to instantly deny access to SharePoint content when a user’s status changes, such as employee resignations or terminations, as well as to block individual group members from accessing sensitive content, even if the group itself has access to the content. 
• Centralized Policy Administration – apply TITUS policies across site collections, sites, libraries, or folders using powerful new administration options. Administrators can centrally control policies or delegate administration to business unit managers or site owners.  
• Support for SharePoint 2013 - the TITUS SharePoint Security Suite fully supports this great new release of Microsoft SharePoint, while still maintaining support for SharePoint Server/Foundation 2010 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
• Auditing for Effective Data Governance - support effective data governance and compliance by auditing TITUS administrator and security policy actions. Organizations can track when administrators create, edit, or delete a TITUS policy. They can also track when TITUS sets or changes content permissions, enables user access through dynamic policies, applies visual markings to documents, and converts documents to PDF.
• Software Development Kit – leverage the TITUS SharePoint Security Software Development Kit (SDK) to easily integrate with existing line-of-business applications and apply security to large and complex SharePoint farms.  

TITUS Security Suite for SharePoint is made up of two products that can be purchased individually or together:

• TITUS Metadata Security automatically controls access to sensitive content and manages permissions based on metadata properties and trusted user claims.
• TITUS Document Policy Manager automatically applies visual labels and converts documents to PDF to enhance security and raise awareness of sensitive content.

-Antonio

Securing Mobile Access to SharePoint 2010

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has some great capabilities built in for accessing SharePoint from a mobile device. Some mobile browsers are fully supported out of the box, and others are partially supported today, with more support to come in the future. Lately I’ve been researching how we secure access to SharePoint from a mobile device or tablet for a particular customer, and there are several useful blog posts already out there that have been an enormous help. Securing access from a mobile device is becoming a critical part of security planning for SharePoint, as the phenomenon of Bring Your Own Device to work just continues to grow. In this short post, I’d like to highlight those articles and point readers to them as an important resource as they think about how to allow secure access to SharePoint from a mobile device.

With the phenomenon of Bring Your Own Device to work, IT departments no longer have complete control of which devices are being used to access corporate resources. People want to use their own mobile device or tablet in order to get their work done. And, enterprises want to allow this because of the cost savings involved, despite the risks.

In fact, a recent Forrester survey found that 81% of enterprises will support or are interested in supporting the iPad this year. This means that mobile access must be considered when determining how to control access to your sensitive content in SharePoint.

In planning mobile access to your SharePoint 2010 deployment, you should first consult the following article on the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering Team Blog:

Configure SharePoint Server 2010 for Mobile Device Access

It will introduce the supported mobility scenarios for Office 2010. These mobility scenarios rely on support from SharePoint 2010 mobility, and this post describes how to setup your SharePoint environment so you can take advantage of mobile access.

Securing Access to Various Mobile Browsers

In Microsoft SharePoint 2010 today, you can enable or deny access to SharePoint based on a user’s mobile browser. This allows you to control which types of mobile devices can and cannot access SharePoint. This is configured through a simple customization of Out-Of-Box SharePoint. For the technical folks in the crowd, this is done by adding the appropriate section and user-agent string to the compat.browser file under the Virtual Directories folder for your specific web application.

There is a great blog post on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog found here (SharePoint 2010 and Apple iPad) that will guide you step by step on how to configure this.

Redirecting Users to the Full Web Interface on Mobile Browsers

As well, there are circumstances when the SharePoint 2010 mobile web interface is just not sufficient for your needs, either from a content collaboration point of view or from a security point of view. Through some simple code, you can modify the SharePoint redirect for mobile access to present the full web interface as opposed to the more limited mobile interface.

There is a great blog post by Waldek Mastykarz found here (Inconvenient SharePoint 2010 Mobile Redirect) that will walk you through the code and the modifications necessary to make this happen.

Special thanks to the authors of these articles, who spend their time helping the communicate understand how to better share and collaborate securely in Microsoft SharePoint.

-Antonio