If you are familiar with my blog, you know there are many Enterprise Rights Management Solutions (also called Information Rights Management or Enterprise DRM) out there. This is a technology that is gaining in popularity, but you have to choose a solution that will meet your requirements. Remember, you don’t have to compromise.

So what are the 10 top must haves in the selection of your enterprise rights management solution?

1. Support for all file formats
   Must support all file formats within your organisation, and extendable to support native file formats
   
   
2. Scalability
   Depending on your requirements, you should always ask what their largest deployment is by users. If this is going to be used by a small department then this requirement may not be pertinent.
   
   
3. Integration with all applications
   The enterprise rights management solution must be application agnostic. In other words it will keep up with the updates of rendering applications no matter what file format.
   
   
4. Support for Role based policies
   Role based policies ensures flexible access to protected documents instead using a person’s name. The individual name is entered under a policy, while the policy is applied to the document.
   
   
5. Support for both internal and external collaboration.
   Your Enterprise DRM solution should enable you protect files within and outside your Firewall.
   
   
6. Integration with the Enterprise’s Identity and Access Management (IAM).
   Using enterprise rights management integration feature will further the enterprise’s goal of using IAM to provide appropriate access to enterprise resources. IAM encapsulates people, processes and products to identify and manage the data used in an information system to authenticate users and grant or deny access rights to data and system resources.
   
   
7. Offline capability.
   You should be able to work with enterprise rights management protected files even when offline or when a network is not available.
   
   
8. Less administrative overhead in terms of transparency to the user.
   The Enterprise DRM solution selected must not significantly disrupt the way users perform their normal work.
   
   
9. Integration with Data Loss Prevention.
   Depending on your network infrastructure your Enterprise DRM solution must integrate with data loss prevention solution or possess its own context sensitive solution.
   
   
10. Unpackage protected files.
    There will be times when confidential documents no longer remain confidential and can be released into the general domain. You should be able to remove the Enterprise DRM protection on such documents.

Other names for Enterprise Rights Management are:-
1. Enterprise DRM
2. Enterprise Digital Rights Management
3. Information Rights Management
4. Intelligent Rights Management and
5. Document Rights Management