Workshare Introduces Protect 3.0 to Eliminate Microsoft Office Metadata Risks
Metadata Management for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint Protects Sensitive Document Content from Unwanted Exposure
San Francisco, Calif.—August 23, 2004—Workshare, the leading provider of content change applications for professionals, today announced companies can eliminate the risk of exposing potentially damaging or sensitive metadata with its Workshare Protect 3.0. With Protect 3.0 companies gain greater control of content in their Microsoft Office documents, whether used on the desktop or shared via email, through features such as automatic metadata cleaning options, internal and external metadata policy settings and one-step PDF conversion capabilities.
Every time a file is created or updated in Microsoft Office, metadata—which is hidden information such as tracked changes, built-in properties, comments, smart tags, hyperlinks and footnotes—is tracked automatically. Traditionally, users needed to manually strip the information or chance embarrassment, financial risk or liability to a company if it fell into the wrong hands. Since documents, spreadsheets and presentations are frequently the collaborative product of several parties, metadata risks are intensified. Workshare’s Protect 3.0 offers the fastest, most effective method to safeguard against these threats with an easy to use application that can be set to require little or no user intervention or training.
“Workshare Protect gives our firm the confidence that the documents we share outside our firm are free from any unwanted, or potentially damaging, metadata,” said Gary Osborne, director of information technology at Calfee Halter & Griswold LLP. “Implementing Protect was a proactive step for us. By installing Protect across the organization we know our documents are being cleaned of these risks and our lawyers can feel secure in the materials they share.”
Workshare Protect 3.0 New Features Include:
• Support of Excel and PowerPoint—Protect 3.0 now cleans metadata in any Microsoft Office application including Excel and PowerPoint.
• Metadata Risk Reports—Protect 3.0 Risk Reports indicate if there is no potentially damaging information in a Word document, ensuring it can be shared with confidence.
• PDF Support—With no additional software purchases, Protect 3.0 easily converts documents to PDF, enforcing security settings such as prohibiting printing, modifying text, copying of text or graphics or adding comments.
• Metadata Policy Settings—Companies can use Protect 3.0 to set standard metadata policies, on a departmental or organizational level, on how and what metadata should be cleaned automatically when sending emails to internal or external recipients.
• Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise Integration—With version 3.0, Protect now integrates with Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise as well as Microsoft Outlook to remove metadata from emails with the click of a button.
“Companies are beginning to realize the present threat metadata means for their organization,” said Joe Fantuzzi, Workshare president and CEO. “Expecting end users to be responsible for manually stripping every business document of each hidden comment or author name is clearly not an effective method. Workshare Protect 3.0 is a simple solution that works right along with Microsoft Office and ensures the world sees only the work as it was intended.”
Pricing and Availability
Workshare Protect 3.0 is available now with per user pricing based on volume.
About Workshare
Workshare is the industry leader in premier content change applications for professionals in the global enterprise. Its suite of products includes the award-winning Workshare DeltaView for comparison, Workshare Protect for security and Workshare 3 for content change management. Over 4,300 companies and over 650,000 professionals in 60 countries use Workshare’s software. Workshare is the sponsor of Metadatarisk.org, the definitive source for content security. For more information about Workshare’s products, please visit www.workshare.com.
