One response to “Office 2003 bug locks you out of your documents”

1. 

   Herby Sagues April 3rd, 2010 at 06:06

   The message said that you “should try again later”. And trying again later (24 hours later, when the fix was issued) actually solved the problem. So I would say the message was quite accurate

   Now, regarding your aversion to DRM, I can understand that when talking about media and other stuff you expect to “own”. Also, about anything that’s of mass appeal, since the “break once, use anywhere” mantra applies.
   But for corporate documents I don’t see what’s the problem.
   If you’ve ever worked at a large company you’ll know that users can’t always be trusted to keep confidential information that’s available to them confidential. No, it is not a matter of training (though training helps) as the continous leakages we see indicate. If it is a matter of just clicking the “forward” button or saving a document into a pen drive, and users can claim they didn’t know it was wrong, they’ll do it.
   Yes, this type of DRM (whcih Microsoft calls IRM to differentiate it from the media stuff) is not hacker-proof, and it is not supposed to be. It is supposed to help enforce information policies at a company.

   And it does work. I’ve been following data leakage incidents for long, and I’m yet to see a single one where documents protected with this type of solution from any vendor have actually been disclosed in any other way than “rumors”. Yes, it is technically possible that it might happen, but in practice it doesn’t since users are very reluctant to break the rules when they cannot later claim it was an accident, or that they didn’t know it was wrong.
   So you have a solution that effectively works, that has minimal risk (your documents could get locked by a flaw in the system, just like with any encryption solution unless you know the keys by memory), is easy to use and compatible with most documents users create and you consider that “a piece of &#%*!”?
   I don’t get it.