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Call to action: If your using RMA (Rights Management Add-On for I.E.), I want to know. - RMS: Protecting Your Assets. - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

RMS: Protecting Your Assets.




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Hello everyone,

How many people have heard the saying 'There is no such thing as a free lunch'? Well it's true. Time for you all to pay for your free lunch (the time I spend writing these posts to help people get the most out of RMS. OK, I didn't say it was a good lunch...just a free one. :)). 

I'm posting this in an effort to get a bigger picture on how many people are using the Rights Management Add-on for I.E. This is essentially the plug-in for I.E. that allows you to read RMS protected content, via OWA. It also allows people with versions of Office earlier that Office 2003, to consume RMS protected content.

If you are using this component please let me know. If you are an administrator, please let me know how many of your users are using it.

This can be a rough guesstimate. an added bonus, please tell me what applications that are not currently RMS aware, you would like to see become RMS aware. Feel free to also tell me if you hate me, and my blogs. I thrive on rejection. :)

I ask for these surveys to get a better idea about how we can make RMS better. Our developers actually take this information, and start doing the work, and evaluating the most common 'asks' for things, so that they can start building this into the product.

Is there a better way to make a product better, than to ask the people using it (or not using it) in the 'real world' to give feedback? I don't think so. :) All the marketing people in the world, with their shiny hair and teeth, and powerpoint slide shows, and research of the meaning of life in relation to RMS is no substitute for the 'troops' (that's you), giving direct feedback (that I make sure gets delivered and discussed) on how we can make things better for you. Can I get an AMEN!!

Thanks in advance for your responses. If I get no responses, I'll just assume that, no-one uses RMA, and our product is the best product ever made, and that you are all so completely satisfied with RMS, that adding anything to it would take away from it's awsomeness...if that is a word.

No. This isn't like a presidential election. Your vote actually counts here. :)


  • we currently have only a handful (<50) of users that access content using the RMA client.  We are looking at rolling RMS out to the entire user communitly, which would include around ~45,000 branch technology terminal server users - if this client experience can be improved to be more intuitive than it is now.  

  • Thanks for taking the time to answer this. I sent your comments to development. I know who you are already though, and you are one of the main reasons we are pushing to get more people to let us know if they are using the component. :)


  • First of all - thank U for your exselent RMS blog. It helps me to solve a lot of RMS problems.

    And now about topic, we have Office 2003 in corp. standart. That is why we have not RMA client on our workstations(5000 comps).

    It will be nice if future RMS will supports the following file formats: Visio, Project, PDF, JPG, TIF and Lotus Notes e-mail.

    Why MS didn`t support native Visio and Project??? Is it gives the work for partners?

    And in addition, it will be good if we can set rights to print and expiration date right for individual user, not for all.

    BR, MasK

  • My pleasure.

    In case you haven't figured it out, I like my job, because I believe in the product. I want to make sure that the people using it have access to as much information as possible.

    Ad far as file formats, you will see more and more products having RMS integrated in them. Not just Microsoft products either. I expect that most major CAD, and rendering software companies will start integrating. Who doesn't want to protect their intellectual property, and with RMS shipping OOTB with LH, you can see that Microsoft has made a significant investment in RMS, which means eventually ALL of our apps will have it integrated.

    I have seen this last request before (maybe even from you on one of the aliases), and think its a great idea, and have put it in as a feature request for future consideration. Thanks for the great feedback!


  • does the current RMA version support IE7, we seem to be having issues opening RM content on workstations that have IE 7 deployed.

  • Yes. RMA supports I.E. 7.

    It's always helpful if you post the specific problem you are experiencing.


  • I am not using the Add-On for I.E., however I am getting reports that when the customer has Office 2003 and IE 7 installed, they can not create or read restricted content.  When they run IRM Check, it shows no user certificates, and the CLC is not created.  Apparently this just started after installing IE 7 - any suggestions?

    BTW - really enjoy everything you have posted - it has helped me out several times.

    - Sonja

  • A little tough to handle in a comment, but I'll give it a shot:

    1. Did the users 'use to' be able to open content on these machines (prior to installing I.E. 7)? I'd be hard-pressed to believe they did, if they do not have any certs on the machine.

    2. Did the results of the IRMCheck show any errors related to the RMS Cluster URL not being in the trusted, or local intranet zone settings in I.E.?

    3. Do the users get any errors when they try to open a piece of RMS protected content?

    4. Are there any errors generated on the RMS server (like event ID: 9)?

    It's pretty tough to troubleshoot RMS issues blindly, so there is a few things I would need to know, to have a chance at helping you resolve this.

    The best tip I can give you is *never* take the end users word for it. Always verify the data if you can, otherwise you may spend hours chasing down a red herring. :)


  • HI Jason,

    I get a message in IE "Cannot open document with restricted permissions"

    This comes up when I try to open a restricted document (in a pop up window) which is shared through a web portal. Is there a way to give my credentials to open the document?



  • The RM Addon for IE is really kind of horrible.  It hasn't been updated in nearly 6 years.  It doesn't seem to work at all really with IE8.  You install it, it's enabled in IE, you click on an *.rpmsg and it fails to open complaining that it's not associated with a program.  If you associate it with IE and re-click the *.rpmsg, it shows you the "checking license" window briefly, disappears, and never opens the message.  The only way I can make this work is to save the *.rpmsg file and open it from the file system.  Are you telling me that you can't make a newer version of the client that takes advantage of updated features and let's me open an *.RPMSG right from the webmail browser window as if its just another email?  This should be transparent to the end-user.

    A few rants about RMS itself.  Why can't I request a certificate directly from an internal CA during the install?  OCS allows this.  Lync allows this.  Was someone just too lazy to provide that functionality here?  If I want to use a cert from an internal CA, I have to manually configure it in IIS after the fact.  Documentation on this aspect is non-existent.  The RMS admin interface is not intuitive at all.  It feels like it was developed by the same people that developed Exchange 5.5, especially the Rights Policy Templates interface.  Distributing Rights Policy Templates is really painful.  The documentation provided on Technet for this is extremely poor.  The "pipeline" for Vista and higher is laughable.  A scheduled task??  Really??  1998 called, it wants its technology back.  I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the convoluted and error-ridden documentation on that.  Good luck re-running it within 30 days as most people won't find how to re-run it sooner than that buried in there.  You need to scrap the entire documentation and rewrite it from scratch, deploying the registry keys, templates, packages, etc. via group policy preferences.  You still recommended copying the templates using a half-assed vbscript example (which is error-ridden itself) via group policy logon scripts.  Thank God for group policy preferences.

    All in all, RMS feels like an afterthought, like MS is begrudgingly still supporting it.  The underneath engine is fantastic but its crippled by an unintuitive user interface, half-assed client configuration, and really poor, outdated documentation.

    Jason, do you still "believe in the product" 3+ years after writing that you did?  $20 says you've jumped ship to another team since posting this.  I would have abandoned this ship too.

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