Active Directory Rights Management Services for Windows 2008

Friends who are familiar with Windows Server 2003 believe that it is not unfamiliar to RMS (Rights Management Services), and that it effectively protects our digital assets from being compromised beyond the scope of the appropriate authorization. This important feature has been improved and upgraded in Windows Server 2008, which Microsoft calls the ad RMS (Active Directory Rights Management Services), the Active Directory Rights Management Service. Compared to 2003 RMS, there are significant improvements and enhancements, such as installing without a separate download, no need to connect to Microsoft for registration, and so on.

The AD RMS system includes a Windows Server 2008-based server that runs the Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) server role for processing certificates and authorizations, the database server, and the AD RMS client. The deployment of AD RMS Systems provides the following benefits to your organization:

-Protect sensitive information. Applications such as word processors, e-mail clients, and industry applications can enable AD RMS to help protect sensitive information. A user can define who opens, modifies, prints, forwards, or performs other actions on that information. Organizations can create child-customized usage policy templates, such as "confidential-read-only", which can be applied directly to the information described above.

-Permanent protection. AD RMS can enhance existing perimeter-based security solutions, such as firewalls and access control lists (ACLs), to better protect information by locking usage rights within the document itself, controlling how information is used, even after the target recipient has opened the information.

-Flexible and customizable technology. Independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers can use any application with AD RMS enabled or enable other servers, such as content management systems or portal servers running on Windows or other operating systems, to help protect sensitive information. The purpose of enabling ISVs is to integrate information protection into server-based solutions such as document and records management, e-mail gateways and archiving systems, automated workflows, and content checking.

Features in AD RMS

In Windows Server 2008, by using Server Manager, you can set the following components of AD RMS:

-Active Directory Rights Management Services. The Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) role service is a required role service for installing the AD RMS components that are used to publish and use rights-protected content.

-Federated authentication Support. The Federation Support role service is an optional role service that allows federated identities to use the Active Directory Federation Service for Rights-protected content.

Briefly deploy AD RMS

(i) Hardware and software considerations

When you install the AD RMS server role, the system installs the required services, one of which is Internet information Services (IIS). AD RMS also requires a database, such as Microsoft SQL Server, that can run on the same server as AD RMS or in the remote server and Active Directory Domain Services forest.

The following table describes the minimum hardware requirements and recommendations for running a Windows Server 2008 server that has the AD RMS server role.