I do get lot questions from my SharePoint friends and colleagues regarding IRM’s in SharePoint. The questions are:
1. What is IRM
2. Why do someone need that
3. Where should we apply it.
Actually I do not need to answer point 1, as you can Google/Bing it to get the definition but point 2 & 3 are important.
So why do someone need IRM, it’s a great question, as per my experience so far I’ve seen companies using IRM’s to restrict “To Download”, “Print” and “Copy/Paste” content from Document libraries, imagine you have important information to share with executives/Sales team, what are the options? either you need to break the inheritance or give items to expire in day or two, this is good for interim solutions but in the long run that’s not a good practice. So IRM’s is the answer for this, you can apply IRM to that document library and restrict as per the requirements.
The usual scenarios:
1. Protect sensitive Content
2. Protect branding (Users cannot download and make changes and apply to other site collections)
3. Encryption
4. Disable Printing
And you can also use conditions (recommended):
1. Expiration (Users must verify their credentials every x days)
2. End Date (Optional – declares when the policy will no longer apply to the library)
if you need to know how to implement IRM’s in SharePoint here is the link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ms458245(v=office.14).aspx
So that’s the basic intro to IRM’s, please comment for further discussions.