As Microsoft rolls out its first-generation Windows rights-management service (RMS) designed to keep confidential documents, e-mail and other corporate data, the company is working on its second iteration of the technology, which will be part of its Longhorn wave.

At the RSA Europe 2003 show in Amsterdam, Microsoft officially launched its RMS Server and RMS Client technologies. The third piece of its RMS solution – an add-on for Internet Explorer – recently entered Beta 2 and is expected to be finished before the end of this calendar year.

Company officials describe RMS as a technology that's been three years in the making. Word leaked early this year of Microsoft's plans to attempt to secure documents using a technology that is similar to, though not the same as, its Windows Media Rights Manager, which restricts usage of audio, video and other streamed material. Subsequently, Microsoft announced its RMS strategy in February.

"A lot of customers have information-usage policies in their enterprises, but don't know how to enforce them and do the right thing," says Jon Murchinson, RMS product manager. "We want to take accidental use off the table."

Microsoft's own Office 2003 is the first RMS-protected application. In order to lock down Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint documents, Office customers will need to download the RMS Client bits from Microsoft's Web site. They also will have to pay for client-access licenses (CALs) to cover clients that are publishing and consuming RMS-protected data. They also will need the RMS Server, which runs on top of Windows Server 2003 only. The pricing for the various RMS pieces can be found here.

Microsoft officials say they are having "conversations with a wide variety of ISVs" (independent software vendors) about RMS, but so far have no ISV partners for the technology. A number of service providers, including Avenade and EDS, have agreed to back RMS, however. Security vendor Rainbow Technologies has developed an "RMS appliance" designed for customers who either don't allow client Internet connections and/or don't want control of their RMS systems to occur outside of their own domains.

As Microsoft works to get the word out on RMS 1.0, developers inside the company are working on the 2.0 release, which will be designed to work with Longhorn. (Client versions of Longhorn are expected to ship in 2006; Longhorn Server may not appear until 2007, sources say.)

While RMS 1.0 is focused on intra-company rights management, 2.0 will be more about intra-company rights management.

"With 2.0, our focus will be on improving business-to-business (capabilities)," acknowledges Murchinson.

Indeed, at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last week, company officials detailed some of the enhancements on tap for RMS 2.0. Top among these is support for "inter-organizational collaboration scenarios," which would be achieved by delegating rights-management licenses across companies.