Saturday, July 14, 2007

Remove Unwanted Traces from Microsoft Office Documents

The importance of privacy and security of corporate workflow cannot be overestimated. A leaked document can compromise trade secrets and threaten corporate security. But did you know that even a document that you send to a client or publish on the Internet may also contain sensitive information that may harm your privacy and corporate security? Every time you create a document in a Microsoft Office application such as MS Word, Excel or PowerPoint, it is automatically and compulsory tagged with extra information. All documents, spreadsheets and presentations are assigned properties that list document's author, organization name, document change and reviewing history, any comments made by the different editors, editing time, and so on. While some of this information can be useful when working with documents in a workgroup and sharing them within the company, it may cause unwanted problems if the document leaks or is sent or published. The extra private information may become available to a third party, and can certainly put your company at an embarrassing situation or even cause financial risk. Did you know that a line or a paragraph of text that contains sensitive information, even if it is cut, deleted or overtyped, may still be stored in the document's metadata under certain circumstances, such as if document change tracking is enabled? Do you want all the commentary made by your workgroup members while editing a presentation become publically available? Probably not! How can you ensure that no sensitive information leaks with a document you thought doesn't have any? You could certainly do this by making a new installation of Microsoft Office applications, preferably on a clean PC, creating a new document on that machine, and pasting data from the old one. That would give you a fresh copy that does not contain any unwanted traces. But is this a viable solution of you have multiple documents, or is you need to continue changing those documents as part of your workflow? This solution, while being a working one, is time-consuming and not that reliable if you make changes to these newly created documents. Thanks to Smart PC Solutions, Inc., a dedicated solution is available to address this issue. Document Trace Remover, available for download at http://www.smartpctools.com/trace_remover, checks your corporate workflow, including Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and Adobe PDF files for unwanted private information that may infringe your privacy and threaten corporate security. Document Trace Remover discovers all types of meta-information and offers you an easy way to remove any instances of hidden data from your documents. When it is done with the documents, they contain not a single trace of infringing information in them. Batch mode is available to quickly clean multiple documents. Make sure you use Document Trace Remover just before sending or publishing a document to ensure maximum privacy and protect integrity of your corporate data. Make Document Trace Remover part of your routine workflow! Run Document Trace Remover every time before publishing or sending the document outside of your organization to ensure highest level of privacy and security of your corporate workflow.

Alexander Rodichev is a founder of Smart PC Solutions company located in Alexandria, VA. The company develops easy to use solutions for daily care to keep users PC in a good shape.

Article Source: http://www.articlepros.com

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