Industry Insiders article – Don’t Secure Your Documents!

An article I wrote for Microsoft’s Industry Insiders blog site has just been published.

This week I was asked by the IT support guy who works for one of my clients about how a user could put a password on a document. Since I am both their external consultant and their MS Office trainer, I was the right person to call.

To me this question is always a red flag as it implies that the user does not understand the places which already exist for them to save documents in such a way as to give access to the correct group of colleagues (or just themselves). My answer was therefore “I’ll show you how to do it for the sake of argument, but you should tell the user that they should not do this”.

Read the whole of this article about a proper approach to document security and avoiding mere security theatre.

The Industry Insiders site looks at various topics affecting corporate IT, with a slight lean towards information security, which is unsurprising since it is maintained by IT Pro Evangelist for Security, Steve Lamb (and evangelist manager Eileen Brown)