How to prevent users from Saving Items to disk?

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Riddle
  • Start date Start date
J

John Riddle

Hi,

My boss would like to have a particular user be able to work from home and
connect to exchange via VPN. That's great. I've set up several users
(Managers) to do that already including myself. However, this user should not
be able to save contact items from the public folders (which she must have
access to) to her local disk at home. Is there any way to prevent this or at
least make it more difficult. She's not too bright in general and when it
comes to computers, she absolutely clueless. However, that would necessarily
stop her from calling in a friend to her house who might know a little more
than her and showing her how to do it.

Thanks,

John
 
Even if you were able to do that (which you can't, at least not reliably),
what would prevent her from taking a screenshot, which doesn't really take a
computer genius?

Dmitry Streblechenko (MVP)
http://www.dimastr.com/
OutlookSpy - Outlook, CDO
and MAPI Developer Tool
 
I can tell you that she doesn't even know how to take a screen shot. But
that's not the point. Of coarse, she could get a friend over that might know
more than her. A screen shot wouldn't work for her. We have about 60,000
contacts (leads/current clients) in a few public folders that we view via
custom forms with over 100 custom fields each. She'd have to take a screen
shot of each tab of each contact to get the information she needs. There's not
way she could realistically try to do that. I've really just looking for a way
to prevent her from mass copying all the items from a Public Folder into a
Personal Folder.

Thanks,

John

Even if you were able to do that (which you can't, at least not reliably),
what would prevent her from taking a screenshot, which doesn't really take a
computer genius?

Dmitry Streblechenko (MVP)
http://www.dimastr.com/
OutlookSpy - Outlook, CDO
and MAPI Developer Tool
 
I don't think you'll have much luck with this. I can think of at least 4
ways to copy the contacts off the top of my head, I am sure there are many
more:
1. Drag them all to the file system (you'll get a bunch of MSG files)
2. Drag them all to a PST store
3. Print them out (you don't thave to do that one by one)
4. Select all contacts and drag them as attachments to an e-mail.

Dmitry Streblechenko (MVP)
http://www.dimastr.com/
OutlookSpy - Outlook, CDO
and MAPI Developer Tool
 
Yeah, I see that there's not completely reliable way to do this. However, I'm
not that concerned about a user printing them out. They're not that usable as
in printed format. We're a recruiting firm and the database needs to be
searched by a lot of custom fields (skills, resume keywords, etc.) It would
take too long to manually search through a printed list of 30,000 contacts to
be a threat to us. I guess I'll focus on updating the custom form used to view
the contacts to include code in the Read event to check the message store and
if not residing on our system, permanently delete the folder it resides in or
loop through the items and remove all the information for the items in that
folder. Essentially, it would be a virus built into the custom form used to
open the item that would go through any non-authorized message store on the
machine and delete out all contacts of this message class. I can also include
code in the Save event to check whether it is an attachement to a message and
if so, delete itself to try to keep someone from emailing the item to
themselves.

I was really hoping that an Exchange Event Sink might be able to solve the
problem by preventing ANY copying of a message by somehow detecting whether a
copy was being made in any fashion. I guess that's not possible. If there was
a "COPY" event, that would be perfect. I'm not concerned about printing. That
wouldn't be a feasible solution for someone that wanted to leave and take our
database with them.

If you can think of any other safe-guards, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,

John


I don't think you'll have much luck with this. I can think of at least 4
ways to copy the contacts off the top of my head, I am sure there are many
more:
1. Drag them all to the file system (you'll get a bunch of MSG files)
2. Drag them all to a PST store
3. Print them out (you don't thave to do that one by one)
4. Select all contacts and drag them as attachments to an e-mail.

Dmitry Streblechenko (MVP)
http://www.dimastr.com/
OutlookSpy - Outlook, CDO
and MAPI Developer Tool
 
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