I wish to secure word/office documents/templates to prevent their
transmission by email and subsequent use externally. The documents are
password protected as read only and attributed as read only but within the
normal environment must be available for others to use.

Any suggestions as to what can be done - I use server 2003 and 2000
professional for 2 clients. it is et up with active directory.

You could take a blanket approach at the exchange server level and ban
outward transmission of any attachments created in Office. If you did this,
you might also want to think about banning access to webmail so users
couldn't use their webmail accounts to mail out the document(s) and perhaps
disabling floppy drives and cdrw drives to prevent users from taking files
home. Any or all of these approaches could have a severe impact on the way
your users work, particularly if you email documents to clients for comments.

If you wanted to, you could install a metadata checker that converts office
document email attachments to a passworded PDF - you can set the PDF
permissions so that the attached file can't be copied or printed. Again,
this option would prevent return of document product with electronic mark up,
unless you installed another solution. Workshare's products might be of
interest to you in that respect as they have a document collaboration package
that allows you to send out documents for review in a PDF format
(www.workshare.com).

I've worked for law firms for many years and even those firms working on
confidential government projects don't go this far. There has to be an
element of trust in the employees. By all means password your VBA code and
make your templates read-only but much more than that is really a
sledgehammer to crack a nut approach.

Is removing work product from the office premises covered in your standard
terms and conditions of employment? If not, I suggest you raise your concerns
with your HR department in order to implement some modernisations regarding
electronic document content and protection of your company's intellectual
property.
Genine


"Duncan" wrote:

I wish to secure word/office documents/templates to prevent their
transmission by email and subsequent use externally. The documents are
password protected as read only and attributed as read only but within the
normal environment must be available for others to use.

Any suggestions as to what can be done - I use server 2003 and 2000
professional for 2 clients. it is et up with active directory.

Any document you allow someone to see can be copied.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org




Duncan wrote:
I wish to secure word/office documents/templates to prevent their
transmission by email and subsequent use externally. The documents are
password protected as read only and attributed as read only but
within the normal environment must be available for others to use.

Any suggestions as to what can be done - I use server 2003 and 2000
professional for 2 clients. it is et up with active directory.