Office DRM

15Sep/042

Sent Back to the Dark Ages with DRM
Digital Camera man, take a picture of the screen and make your changes using MS paint.

I like this post, it sends a message to the Office team. “Congratulations on making my job harder buttwipes.”
edit: Josh mentiones this in the comments but I want to add it to the main post as well. He’s not actually saying that. He thinks the feature has merit and that his main point is that users should consider the impact of using the feature before using it. I summarized what I would want the Office DRM team to take away from his comment in my own charming words. I think the feature has some merits; I deal with HIPPA protected data almost exclusively in my position so any feature that makes it easy to secure those data is double-plus good in my book. That being said I don’t believe that DRM solves the problem I think it just ends up making it harder for legitimate users to get their work done.

Office is the main cash cow for Microsoft and it looks like they are hard at work screwing that pooch. I don’t know how many people exactly work where I work, but I know we’re still using Office 2000 in our default desktop install images and we’re not exactly small potatos.

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http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard Josh Ledgard

I said this on my blog, but… To be clear… I think that this feature has merritt and the office team should make sure it works as advertised for sharing very sensitive data. My point is more that, like any technology, the users should think about the implications of it’s use.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard Josh Ledgard

Thanks for the edit! But yes, in this case it did make my job harder. After a bit of explination and complaining they sent me a non-DRM version to review.