Windows 7 - Rights Management Services - Protecting .XPS Documents

Asked By Will Hunter

13-Nov-09 09:37 AM

I have found the .XPS document format to be a great alternative to PDF for
our Intranet applications.  However, I currently have a need to prevent
Saving, Printing, and Content Extraction from certain .XPS documents.

We do not have a RMS Server in-house.  However, when I use the .XPS viewer
embedded in IE, I have the option to manage rights and can easily restrict
through the use of my .NET passport account.

I need to be able to protect these .XPS documents from being Printed and
Saved (Save As) by anyone.  There is no need to manage any additional rights
for any specific user, just prevent anyone from doing anything with the
document once it has been generated.

To do this programmatically, it appears as though we need a RMS Server setup
on our domain.  Since we are wanting to restrict this document for everyone
and no specific user, it seems this should be a simple process without all
the licensure hassle, not to mention the impossibility of licensing

I hope that I am missing something here.  In the end, all I want to do is
set rights programmatically on an XPS document prevent Printing and Saving by
everyone.  I would hate to have to go back to PDF as it is clunky in the
browser and XPS provides us with a much greater user experience.

Thank you all for your time.

08-Dec-09 10:38 AM

Is this not possible?  Does anyone have any ideas?  I simply need to protect
XPS documents so that they may not be printed or saved via the Microsoft XPS
document viewer.

Thanks.

05-Jan-10 01:23 PM

I'm trying to do the exact same thing.  Have you had any luck with this??

12-Jan-10 10:58 AM

Would the Microsoft representative to called me about this around the Holiday
please call me again?  Our voicemail system went down and I seem to have lost
your number.  Thanks.

14-Jan-10 10:08 AM

I gave up on the XPS route.  Unfortunately, I found that protecting XPS
documents with currently available options was overly involved given the
simple needs of my project.  I guess you could say the juice was not worth
the squeeze.  I hope we see this change in the future.

I ended up going the "flash paper" route with open source tools.  I used
PDF2SWF from SWFTools along with ZViewer from Crirus Timisoara.  I also
really like the FlexPaper viewer from Erik Devaldi and will likely migrate to
it once the option to disable printing has been added.  I understand that it
is impossible to prevent all printing/saving/etc with these flash tools but
they meet the requirements for my simple project.

Will

14-Jan-10 10:08 AM

Nevermind!

26-Jan-11 05:52 PM

Will,



Thanks for sharing your solution.  I've been trying to figure out the very same thing.  I tried AcroPDF from Adobe and Adobe Document Level Security but the problem is that you cannot prevent someone from copying the document (Save As).  According to Abobe, this is the intended functionality and they don't plan on giving the option to disable the Save Copy function.  I tried to do it with XPS but they make it so that you must purchase the DRM software to accomplish this simple task.  I found one commercial software that claims to have read-only PDF's but I don't want to build an enterprise solution using a third-party add-on from a small company.



I'm going to try to figure out how you did it and see if that works.  There is seriously no information on the internet about how to accomplish this seemingly simple requirement.