From: BillK (bill@wkidston.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 12:31:34 MST
Tue Mar 11, 2003 10:45 am Mike Lorrey wrote:
> It is so disappointing when a report purporting to be dispassionate
> can't even hide its own disinformation very well. Files produced by
> any new version of any software, when the file formats are not
> industry standards (as WP, Lotus, and older versions of MS Office are
> proprietary, while GIF, JPG, RTF, TXT, etc are standardized) are not
> readable by older versions of that software or of any competitive
> application introduced prior to the new version.
My apologies for the confusion, Mike. My snapshot extract did not convey
the full meaning of what he is saying. You need to read the full story
about the proposed Rights Management Services (RMS) to get it.
In the old days, when MS brought out a new document format, all the
other software packages swiftly updated their packages to read the new
format and MS issued programs like the free MS Word Viewer to enable
customers to read the new format documents.
This will happen no more.
RMS (which works with Windows Server 2003) issues a license certificate
containing access permissions when a document is created. So, in the
case of a Word document created in Office 2003, the person creating it
would use the "permission" button to set or restrict access. The process
accesses RMS, which encrypts the file and includes a license for
permissions.
In order to read an RMS protected document, the user has to access the
RMS server and get their license authenticated by the server.
> Ah, so the authors are disparaging Microsoft for doing something which
> Apple already did with it's OSX upgrade?
He does get a bit anti-MS in places, but his main intent is to open
peoples' eyes to the future plans of MS. I find it difficult to see how
you can read this report and follow up some of the over a hundred links
he provides and not get a bit anti-MS yourself!
Even if you do decide to go down the MS route at least you will have a
better idea of the considerable costs involved.
BillK
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