First published on CloudBlogs on Aug, 29 2013
Howdy folks,
Today I'm blogging about some exciting news from a part of the Active Directory team that we haven't talked about much yet – our Rights Management Service (RMS) team.
Just a few hours ago, our RMS team turned on the public preview of:
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The latest version of the Windows Azure RMS service
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RMS client SDK's for Windows, Windows Phone, iOS and Android
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A cool new secure sharing application for Windows
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The availability of a free version of Azure RMS for individuals.
With these new capabilities, we're rapidly delivering on our RMS vision of giving anyone in the world the ability to securely share documents and files of any type with all the people they work on the devices they love.
Here's the announcement by Dan Plastina, the GPM for the RMS team, on
the RMS blog
.
The Azure RMS service that powers this preview is a great example of the kinds of services that can be built using Windows Azure AD.
Azure AD, when connected to AD via our DirSync component, lets the Azure RMS service benefit from a cross-organization 'trust fabric'. By this I mean that once a company set ups up their Azure AD tenant, (and optionally configures DirSync and federation) services like Azure RMS can rely on it to enable business to business (B2B) collaboration that until this time have been incredibly difficult and costly to configure and maintain.
Before Azure AD, this kind of secure collaboration would have been done using pairwise federation with every organization your organization needed to collaborate with. In today's highly interconnected economy fast moving economy, that kind of point to point model just isn't affordable or agile enough to work.
I hope you'll agree that the combination of Azure AD and Azure RMS is pretty amazing – with them, we're enabling a new class of agile, affordable, secure, cross-organization collaboration that's never been possible before. Both Dan and I will continue to blog about this service in the coming months. We've got a lot more exciting news on the way!
And as always, I look forward to your comments, questions and feedback.
Best regards,
Alex Simons
Director of Program Management
Active Directory Division
