Sharing Documents with External Organizations

Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

In today’s economy it is common for companies to have close relationships with other organizations. These can include industry partners, suppliers, customers and vendors. These relationships between organizations commonly include confidential information sharing. The need to share confidential information, such as trade secrets or communication related to mergers and acquisitions, in a controlled fashion, is a necessity. At the same time, these organizations rarely have a common infrastructure, and their independence renders integrated management of their platforms infeasible (including integrated management of user identities and security).

In such scenarios, people within an organization must have the ability to exchange protected documents with users in another organization while the infrastructures remain independent. AD RMS provides several alternatives to achieve such a goal, which are discussed in the following sections.