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Background

I've designed a word template for a customer. It has a large number of nested quick parts that speed up his document creation process.

He is concerned that some of his employees may take copies of this when they leave and take them to a competitor. He needs each of his employees to be able to create new documents with the template and save them as pdf, but doesn't want them to be able to create copies of the template.

He has both on site windows servers with AD and also Office 365.

Question

What can I do to prevent people copying a dotx file, whilst also allowing them to use it to create new pdf documents?

Rob Mason
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  • Thanks for the down vote. Any chance you could add a comment why? – Rob Mason Jun 04 '18 at 09:06
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    If you let people read a file, then they can copy it. – marsh-wiggle Jun 04 '18 at 09:12
  • take a look at DLP for Office 365. – Bruno Faria Jun 04 '18 at 10:24
  • By philosophy and design votes are anonymous and **neither voting [up](//$SITEURL/help/privileges/vote-up) nor voting [down](//$SITEURL/help/privileges/vote-down) requires any mandatory explanation**. The tooltip that appears when your mouse pointer hoovers over the down button states: *"this question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful"*. Also questions can attract a down vote when not [well written](http://meta.serverfault.com/a/3609/37681), not quite [on-topic](http://serverfault.com/help/on-topic) or missing details. – Jenny D Jun 05 '18 at 08:50
  • @JennyD, thanks for the explanation. Guess it's the lack of research on this occasion. – Rob Mason Jun 06 '18 at 05:41
  • On this occasion, I think it's rather that it's not really on topic for this site. But obviously I can't speak for whoever cast that vote. – Jenny D Jun 06 '18 at 08:08
  • Also, as a general rule, people who downvote a question are unlikely to go back and read the comments to that question. The only ones reading the comments are those seeing it for the first time or who are being pinged in the comments or who have favourited it or otherwise are specifically looking for it. – Jenny D Jun 06 '18 at 08:12

1 Answers1

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As your using Office 365 then you could look at using Azure Information Protection however it's a pretty complex tool to add just to protect 1 file, plus it won't stop someone photographing the file or similar.

Sam Cogan
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  • Thanks. That looks as though it could work. I’m going to try via https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/information-protection/get-started/infoprotect-quick-start-tutorial to see if it can do what I want. – Rob Mason Jun 04 '18 at 13:36