AD RMS Decommissioning Step-by-Step Guide

This step-by-step walks you through the process of decommissioning Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) in your organization. Removing AD RMS requires that all rights-protected content that you want to be able to use be decrypted before all servers are removed from the AD RMS cluster.

Once complete, you can use the test lab environment to learn about AD RMS decommissioning on Windows Server® 2008 and assess how it might be deployed in your organization.

As you complete the steps in this guide, you will:

• Decommission an AD RMS cluster.
  
  
• Verify the removal of AD RMS functionality after you complete the configuration.
  
  

This guide assumes that you previously completed the steps in the Windows Server Active Directory Rights Management Services Step-by-Step Guide (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72134), and that you have already deployed the following components:

• An AD RMS server
  
  
• An AD RMS database server
  
  
• One AD RMS-enabled client
  
  
• One Active Directory domain controller
  
  

We recommend that you first use the steps provided in this guide in a test lab environment. Step-by-step guides are not necessarily meant to be used to deploy Windows Server features without additional deployment documentation and should be used with discretion as a stand-alone document.

Upon completion of this step-by-step guide, you will have a decommissioned AD RMS infrastructure. You can then test and verify AD RMS functionality by opening a rights-protected document and ensuring that the document is decrypted.

The test environment described in this guide includes four computers connected to a private network and using the following operating systems, applications, and services:

Computer Name	Operating System	Applications and Services
ADRMS-SRV	Windows Server 2008	AD RMS, Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, World Wide Web Publishing Service, and Message Queuing
CPANDL-DC	Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) Note Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 is not required but will be used for the purposes of this guide.	Active Directory or Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Domain Name System (DNS)
ADRMS-DB	Windows Server 2003 with SP2 Note Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 is not required but will be used for the purposes of this guide.	Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Standard Edition with Service Pack 2 (SP2) Note Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition is not required but will be used for the purposes of this guide.
ADRMS-CLNT	Windows Vista®	Microsoft Office Word 2007 Enterprise Edition

Note
For more information about the system requirements for installing AD RMS, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=84733.

The computers form a private intranet and are connected through a common hub or Layer 2 switch. This configuration can be emulated in a virtual server environment if desired. This step-by-step exercise uses private addresses throughout the test lab configuration. The private network ID 10.0.0.0/24 is used for the intranet. The domain controller is named CPANDL-DC for the domain named cpandl.com. The following figure shows the configuration of the test environment: