IRM (Information Rights Management) in SharePoint

This is just a very brief review from my reading of a MS white paper coming with the ECM starter kit.

IRM allows you to have control over a document after it’s downloaded from SharePoint.

This is how is works:

• You need to install/configure IRM at server farm first
• You can configure the Doc Lib to use certain IRM policy (such as No Print, or downloaded copy expires after x days). This policy applies to whole doc lib and you can’t customized at folder level.
• Nothing important happens when you upload a file
• When a support file (you have to install the “protector” for this file type. MOSS 2007 has word, excel, and powerpoint covered) is being downloaded, WSS will encrypt it and send you back the encrypted version.
• You need a IRM-ready viewer to view these files (Office 2003 is fine), or you need to install necessary components for your viewer.
• Your local viewer need to connect to a “Windows Rights management Services” server to decrypt the file.

For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, meta data are not encrypted.

Automatically login with domain account

I believe the majority of the SharePoint sites are set up to use Windows Active Directory login. However if the site is set up using a domain name, IE will treat it as a “Internet” zone, and you will be prompted with login window. That’s because the default security setting of Internet zone is not to automatically login with your user name and password.

The best practice to get around this issue is to add your site to the “Trusted Sites” list, and configure it to automatically login (which is the default setting already). Sometimes the Trusted Sites list is locked by a corporate group policy and network admins have to make that change. You have to run

Gpupdate /force

to refresh the group policy on your desktop.

If you want to add multiple sites to the Trusted Sites, this syntax will do it:

*.sharepoint.mydomain.com

Select a view for Document Library web part

With MOSS 2007, after inserting a document library web part, you can select a specific view to use for this web part (same for other list web parts).

However I found that once the web part is created, the changes made to that view will not be automatically reflected in the web part. You have to go back to the edit properties window of the web part and re-select the view. It looks like the web part creates a local “instance” of the view definition.

Got javascript error after enabled Content Type

I created a few customized Content Types in the site and enabled “Manage Content Types” in document library. Now when user creates new files from the template and save it, a javascript error will pop up in DIP window: “‘length is null or not an object”.

Microsoft confirmed it’s a SharePoint bug and now finally have a hot fix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950292

However this hotfix requires SP1 and another post-SP hotfix. Not only that, it’s not an officially released hotfix (that’s why you have to request it in another web page), which means it not 100% tested.

There are many people frustrating about it and have some workaround. Unfortunately none of them work for me because Content Types is in our business request.

Another thing is once the Content Type is enabled, this problem will be permanent even Content Type is turned off later. Seems turning on Content Types has permanent change on the document library, even no document is created from the new content type.