Microsoft unveiled on Friday its plan for integrating digital-rights management technology throughout its product lines.

Next week, the Redmond software vendor plans to make a closed technical beta of its Windows Rights Management Services (WRMS) server available to selected testers. WRMS, formerly code-named "Tungsten," will be a server that will layer on top of Windows Server 2003, and later, be bundled directly into future versions of Windows on the desktop and server.

Microsoft also is making available to selected testers a set of WRMS application-programming interfaces. These APIs will run on desktop versions of Windows, including Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP, allowing them to act as secure rights-management clients that can access the WRMS server.

When Beta 2 of Office 2003 ships in early March, Microsoft also will be making available to testers new APIs in the Office suite that will turn on the "information rights management" DRM features that are being included in the Office 2003 product.

Finally, later this spring, Microsoft is planning to make its WRMS software development kit available to third-party software vendors, corporate developers and systems integrators, company officials say.

Mike Nash, Microsoft corporate VP in charge of the company's security business unit, is spearheading Microsoft's DRM strategy for all of its product lines.

Microsoft's existing Windows Media DRM and its newly introduced WRMS are just two components of this strategy. Microsoft and third-party software vendors who sign on to use WRMS are likely to add the technology to other enterprise and consumer products in the future.

"Windows Rights Management is part of our overall security strategy," Nash says. "We are giving customers a better way to protect their sensitive business information."

Nash said Microsoft's hope is to get software companies and in-house developers to use Windows Rights Management to secure all of their client applications, including Web applications. Microsoft's first rights-management application will be Office 2003, Nash says.

WRMS does not share any code in common with the DRM platform that Microsoft currently includes in its Windows Media Series products. Instead, WRMS will rely on XrML (Extensible Rights Markup Language), an emerging standard for the expression of rights on digital content.

WRMS is built on top of the ASP.Net technology that is part of Microsoft's .Net Framework. As such, WRMS can interoperate with other non-Microsoft applications and operating systems that make use of Web services standards, Nash adds.

Adobe is one company that Microsoft has briefed on its DRM plans.

As there is not yet even a software development kit available, Adobe is not ready yet to endorse Microsoft's WRMS platform, says John Landwehr, Adobe group manager for security solutions.

"We would like to work with common DRM technologies that are available out in the market," Landwehr says. He adds that Adobe's ePaper file format/framework currently supports multiple DRM engines today, and that Adobe itself provides rights management across its Acrobat and eBook product lines today.