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Office 2003 includes Information Rights Management technology that enables the authors of documents to restrict who can view, edit, print or copy the files.

Controlling such permissions is nothing new. Similar technology is included in Adobe's PDF standard, but while that is a standard accessible on many computing

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and communication platforms, it would seem that the IRM in Office 2003 can restrict documents to distribution solely in a Windows environment.

Because the technology is exclusive to Office 2003, it does mean that not only can protected files not be read in Mac versions of Office, they will also be inaccessile to users of older Windows versions, including Office XP. To solve this Microsoft has released a plug-in for Internet Explorer 6 that utilises a built-in HTML version of the rights managed file, which the authoring application automatically creates. However this protected HTML file, which has a .rmh extension rather then .html, will be inaccessible to Mac users.

Microsoft said that it is aware of the potential problems for Mac users, but was unable to say what plans it had with regards to IRM in any future version of Mac Office, or whether it would be releasing a browser plug-in.