We recognize that people are going to want to take advantage of this

The performance improvement is immediately noticeable, although when restarting OpenOffice after the upgrade the QuickStarter app was disabled. As with many Microsoft Office 2010 innovations, the new IRM tools also happen to benefit the software giant's sales in a complementary market--server software--where there's room for growth, as opposed to the fairly saturated market for desktop applications.

Rosoff said IRM should see fairly quick adoption--at least compared with complex XML-based functions to be tied into Download Office 2010--because it solves an immediate business problem and is relatively cheap and easy to implement.

Both IRM and expanded XML (Extensible Markup Language) functionality--the two biggest areas of innovation in Office 2003--tap into Microsoft's server software. IRM in particular requires Windows Server 2003, which businesses have been slow to adopt since Microsoft finally unveiled it earlier this year.

"When you dominate a market, you change that market," Rosoff said.
"Office already has all the document management features people could possibly want. The only way to add value to Office is to make it part of this larger system that adds value."

Microsoft's Leach said Windows Server 2003 simply was the best avenue for delivering rights management functions. "To solve the problem our customers identified...it requires the ability to take advantage of some of the capabilities in Windows Server 2003," he said. "There are many companies that have already invested in Windows Server...and this is certainly going to be a differentiator for them."

Rosoff said Microsoft appears to be less concerned about competitors, however, than getting existing customers to upgrade. "I don't think they're extremely worried about the threat of OpenOffice," he said. "They're worried that documents management is a fairly mature technology that's pretty widely available, so they need to come up with a compelling way to do it."

There's also the potential for confusion in companies that don't upgrade every desktop to Office 2010 at the same time. Workers with Office 2003 will be able to produce documents colleagues with older versions can't use.

"The big question is whether they'll try to bring some backward compatibility," Jupiter's Gartenberg said. "If business users insist on a higher level of interoperability with their existing software, that could be a real challenge. It's very hard to go back and re-architect some of the security features for the older systems."

Leach said Microsoft will provide a free plug-in for its Internet Explorer Web browser that will let it display rights-protected Office documents.

"We recognize that people are going to want to take advantage of this that don't have Office 2010," he said. "This way, they can see the document in a browser window (and) they can print, copy or forward," as decided by the document creator.

Leach added that even for organizations that adopt Office 2010, rights management will still be the exception rather than the rule when creating documents.

"It's not something that you would set up as the default, so that every document I would create is rights management protected," he said. "It's important that you make a choice to apply rights management to a document for very specific reasons."


"It's pretty clear with digital rights management what it is and what problems it's trying to solve," he said. "It's not going to be adopted en masse, but I think they'll have a good rollout department by department for people dealing with more  Download Office 2010."