Customers relying on information protection technology from Microsoft need to access an update released on February 9th, 2010, if they are to continue to use the Internet Explorer browser in relation to protected content. The refresh offered by the software giant is set up to kill off completely the application manifest expiry feature from Active Directory Rights Management Services clients. AD RMS customers using IE will need to implement the update in order to compensate the fact that the certificate for the RMA add-in for the browser will expire come February 22nd, 2010.

“The RMA add-in for Internet Explorer allows users to view content with restricted permission in Internet Explorer. It is critical that these customers install the update before then, in order to avoid any issues accessing or protecting web-based content,” revealed a member of the Forefront team.

Once the certificate for the RMA add-in for IE will expire, SD RMS customers leveraging IE which have failed to deploy the refresh will find that they will no longer be able to either create or access protected content from a variety of products, including: Outlook Web Access 2000, 2003, 2007; Word, Excel, Powerpoint web viewers; but also all Cloud-based apps.

“Once this update is applied and the manifest expiry feature is removed, the AD RMS aware applications (including Internet Explorer) will no longer need to renew their manifests. This will eliminate the possibility of manifest expiration. The change will be effective for both new as well as existing RMS products. Applications will still need to have a manifest and RMS Partner ISVs will still need to have a Microsoft issued production certificate for creating that manifest,” the Forefront team representative added.

The recommendation from Microsoft is that all AD RMS customers with client or server apps deploy the update immediately. The Redmond company has already released the refresh through Windows Update for Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 R2, with WU availability for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 planned February 23. However, users of AD RMS can also grab standalone updates via the links in this KB article.