Who Needs To Know?Who Needs To Know?

IBM is retooling its Electronic Media Management System for its middleware platforms, including WebSphere and IBM Content Manager. EMMS originated as a way to protect music files and last year was expanded to include video and text. It's priced around $100,000. IBM's Rettig says the new EMMS was developed using Java 2 Enterprise Edition, which will help to inject DRM into the workflow of business. "The secret here is invisibility, integrating it into the middleware," he says.

Content-management software vendors such as Documentum Inc. and Hummingbird Ltd. already offer access control and security for documents stored within their systems, but that doesn't help if a manager wants to share a document with someone outside the system.

Some companies aren't using a DRM application; instead, they're using secure collaboration severs and vaults. Typically, collaboration vaults provide secure storage, encrypted communication, and authenticated access. Vendors that offer these products include CYA Technologies and Cyber-Ark Software.

Bayer AG, a $25.8 billion-a-year chemical and health-product manufacturer, implemented CYA Technologies' CYA Secure Collaboration Platform. The collaboration platform consists of the UniVault Secure Collaboration Server, where access rights are managed; the CYA Passport, which displays secured content; and the CYA Guardian, a series of connectors that let the platform work with other applications.

"These days everything is done in virtual teams," says Mithat Mardin, Bayer's head of IS coordination. Bayer has sites in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and Mardin likes the fact that the CYA Secure Collaboration Platform doesn't require the company to change the way teams have always worked. The secure collaboration platform also lets Bayer work with external partners securely.

CYA developed the platform after talking to utility-industry executives and discovering that they were dividing documents that detailed how utility plants were constructed and scattering the sections throughout the company, CYA president and CEO Elaine Price says. "They put them in different locations so that one person wouldn't know how to put the main document together," she says. "It's nuts, but they believe that they couldn't trust these documents being put into their electronic systems because someone could potentially misuse or send the information somewhere they shouldn't."

The CYA Secure Collaboration Platform lets users access the information they need in an environment where information can be shared but also is tightly controlled, Price says. While working on the information, users can't print, screen capture, or download the information. "We share the information and not the files."

Those kinds of restrictions may appeal to companies seeking to increase collaboration among internal groups and with external partners but worry about crucial business data falling into the wrong hands. Those concerns should help to boost demand for digital-rights management products, but it will take time before use of such software is widespread.

Photo by Angela Wyant