Talking SharePoint Security
SharePoint Metadata and Classification and more

Recently, TITUS had the opportunity to ask over 200 SharePoint users about their top SharePoint security concerns. The survey confirmed for us what we had been hearing from our customers over the past number of years – organizations are storing a wide variety of sensitive information in SharePoint, from financial and HR information, to intellectual property, to personally identifiable information (PII). Read the rest of this entry »

TITUS Senior Product Manager and SharePoint Server MVP Antonio Maio recently shared some of his insights on SharePoint security. He provided tips, pointed to current challenges and explained how SharePoint will be affected as computing becomes more mobile and social. Read the rest of this entry »

(this was written a few days ago, but I needed a good internet connection before posting it… so here it is) 

A SharePoint feature that I have always found interesting for helping organizations to protect against leaks of sensitive documents is the Information Rights Management capabilities (IRM). One session I attended this week at SPC12 covered this feature and this blog post is going to cover the highlights and what’s new for SharePoint 2013. In this article I’m going to focus on the on-premise deployment of Information Rights Management in SharePoint 2013, but there will be the occasional mention of SharePoint Online.

This feature existed in SharePoint Server 2010 and continues to be enhanced with some additional capabilities in SharePoint Server 2013. This feature is now also available for SharePoint Online (which is awesome) where it is known as Windows Azure AD Rights Management (AADRM). It is available only as part of Office365 Enterprise Plan 3 or Plan 4, and Academic Plan 3 or Plan 4. This feature is not activated by default, and must be configured (this applies for both on-premise and SharePoint Online.
Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings from the SharePoint Conference 2012! This is my first SharePoint show, and it’s been a great experience so far! I’ve really enjoyed working at the booth for the last couple days, especially because it gives me a chance to talk directly to lots of SharePoint administrators and managers. Here are some of my impressions so far:

1. People in the SharePoint community are great! Everyone is so open about the challenges they are experiencing in their environments, and they really want to learn what the various vendors at the show are offering. At some conferences, it can be hard to get attendees to actually visit the exhibit hall, but that is definitely not the case here. The tagline for this conference is “Share More, Do More”, and that spirit of collaboration is very present.
2. SharePoint administrators are really struggling with controlling access through permissions. One administrator told me that “permissions are the bane of my existence”. As soon as you’ve got sensitive data sitting alongside non-sensitive data, you’ve got a permissions management problem; manually setting permissions on each of those documents quickly becomes unmanageable and chaotic. It’s a story that doesn’t need much explaining to this audience, because they are living with it with every day.
3. Conversations about SharePoint go technically deep very quickly. The people who visit our booth understand the problem we are trying to solve (see #2 above), and they understand our approach (automating item-level permissions management using metadata and/or user claims). It doesn’t take long before they are asking questions about performance limitations with permissions, which gives me a chance to talk about our new dynamic policies feature that bypasses SharePoint ACLs to make authorization decisions directly through the TITUS rules-based engine. As a product marketing manager, I was hesitant to get into such technical detail in our marketing messaging, but it’s become very clear to me that SharePoint buyers need that information up front.
4. Data governance is a hot topic among the attendees. It’s really interesting to hear how up to now, SharePoint deployments have had a bit of a Wild West reputation. The SharePoint admins aren’t comfortable with it, but have been under pressure to empower users to run their own sites and collaborate without too many barriers. Still, senior management (including those in the Legal and Compliance departments) are waking up to the risks, and data governance for SharePoint is becoming a much higher priority.

I need to go to the Exhibit Hall now, so I will stop here and hopefully post another blog entry tomorrow or Thursday. In the meantime, please come visit us at Booth #865!

Today we’re very pleased to announce the latest release of the TITUS SharePoint Security Suite! With this release, TITUS is making it easier than ever before to enhance and automate security within Microsoft SharePoint.

TITUS Security Suite for SharePoint version 3.2 enhances security by automatically enforcing fine-grained access control and applying visual labels – promoting strong, consistent data governance for SharePoint content. TITUS products leverage existing document metadata combined with trusted user claims to ensure that security is applied automatically and consistently across all SharePoint content. As Microsoft SharePoint becomes an increasingly critical platform for document and records management, administrators and content owners are faced with the challenge of protecting sensitive content and preventing data breaches. The TITUS SharePoint Security Suite ensures that content in SharePoint is protected automatically and consistently across all SharePoint content.

What’s New

The latest version of TITUS Security Suite for SharePoint is focused on making SharePoint a more secure platform for organizations while simplifying SharePoint security for administrators.  We’ve listened to our customers and put a lot of work into making it easier to manage security in large SharePoint environments.  Here’s a list of just a few of the great features that are new in the TTITUS SharePoint Security for SharePoint version 3.2:

• Dynamic Policies – enforce dynamic, fine-grained security in SharePoint with policies based on trusted user attributes (claims) and metadata. With TITUS dynamic policies, organizations can ensure that the right people are accessing the right information at the right time. Dynamic policies can be used to instantly deny access to SharePoint content when a user’s status changes, such as employee resignations or terminations, as well as to block individual group members from accessing sensitive content, even if the group itself has access to the content. 
• Centralized Policy Administration – apply TITUS policies across site collections, sites, libraries, or folders using powerful new administration options. Administrators can centrally control policies or delegate administration to business unit managers or site owners.  
• Support for SharePoint 2013 - the TITUS SharePoint Security Suite fully supports this great new release of Microsoft SharePoint, while still maintaining support for SharePoint Server/Foundation 2010 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
• Auditing for Effective Data Governance - support effective data governance and compliance by auditing TITUS administrator and security policy actions. Organizations can track when administrators create, edit, or delete a TITUS policy. They can also track when TITUS sets or changes content permissions, enables user access through dynamic policies, applies visual markings to documents, and converts documents to PDF.
• Software Development Kit – leverage the TITUS SharePoint Security Software Development Kit (SDK) to easily integrate with existing line-of-business applications and apply security to large and complex SharePoint farms.  

TITUS Security Suite for SharePoint is made up of two products that can be purchased individually or together:

• TITUS Metadata Security automatically controls access to sensitive content and manages permissions based on metadata properties and trusted user claims.
• TITUS Document Policy Manager automatically applies visual labels and converts documents to PDF to enhance security and raise awareness of sensitive content.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012 – Find Us at Booth #865

We’re here at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas where we’re showing and talking about our new release!  Please stop by booth #865 to talk about how you can make SharePoint a more secure platform for sharing and collaborating.

-Antonio

Sunday night’s welcome reception here at SPC has been awesome! We had a packed house at our booth and met a bunch of great people! We had lots of people enter our draw for COLOUD head phones.

Coloud Color Headphones

We drew for 2 of these great headphones last night and we’ll be getting in touch with our winners via email to come and pick up their pair. We’ll be drawing for lots more of these throughout the week.

We had lots of great conversations at the welcome reception, both at our booth and at the SharePoint TV Community section. Lots of people are interested in our great new features, like Dynamic Policies and Centralized Administration of policies! Its proving to be a great show so far.

TITUS Crew at SharePoint Conference 12

After the welcome reception there was lots happening on the social scene – we hit Coyote Ugly for a while at New York New York for the SPC Passport Party and then hit the impromptu SharePint at the EyeCandy Sound Lounge back at the Mandalay Bay. Hung out with some old friends from the SharePoint community and some new acquaintances. Didn’t make it too late a night because we’re looking forward to the keynote address tomorrow morning with Microsoft executives: Jeff Teper, Jared Spataro, Scott Guthrie and David Sacks (the inclusion of the Yammer in this keynote is not entirely a surprise, but it is interesting).

-Antonio