Cached mode in Outlook 2003 and RMS

Imagine this scenario. You are about to catch a plane. You connect to Internet using a Wi-Fi spot on the airport and sync your Outlook. It’s a long flight and you want to catch up on email during the flight. You jump on the place and when the nice airhostess announces that you can use your portable electronic devices, you pull out your laptop and start reading your email. Now imagine you have a RMS-protected email in your Inbox. Since RMS requires the client to present credentials to the RMS server to get a use license before you can consume the content, you are not able to read that important email.

Here is the solution. If you use Outlook 2003 in cached mode, you can set the Outlook client to automatically license all RMS-protected emails during sync. This way you can ensure that all protected emails in your Inbox have corresponding use licenses downloaded and hence can be viewed. Now you can have a good flight!

P.S. Outlook in cached mode should do the above automatically. If it is not doing so, the Registry entry that controls this behavior is:

  • Hive: HKEY_CURRENT_USER
  • Key: Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook
  • Type: REG_DWORD
  • Entry: UserData
  • Value: 0x00000001

If this is not set, or the entry doesn’t exist, create it and logoff and log back on.