Combining Information Rights Management with Watermarking via an Outlook 2007 add-in
VSTO 3.0 with Visual Studio 2008 makes it incredibly easy to extend the office ribbon, and write managed code to add new functionality. A good proof of this from my recent experience was a simple add-in I wrote which combined Information Rights Management in the 2007 Office System with watermarking for a POC. The idea is that you compose a new email as normal, add some attachments, restrict permissions (for the email and attachments) via IRM and then use the add-in which sends a personalised email to all recipients, where the permissions are restricted as you set out, but attachments are also individually watermarked with the name of the recipient:
In theory this should help mitigate the risk of a recipient taking a digital photograph of restricted content displayed on their screen. Have a look and let me know what you think! It is a little rough around the edges (doesn't clean up temp files at the moment) but not bad for ~60 lines of VSTO code (plus another 50 or so for applying the watermark to the individual documents, which was based on code from a post on Paul Stubbs' blog).
(Double-click for full-screen).
I've attached the code, so you can download via the link below (disclaimer : this is a POC, not production code and is unsupported :-))