Announcing the Microsoft Office 2007 Security Guide

  • Article

If you've made the jump to Office 2007, which I know many of you have, you'll want to grab a copy of the free Office 2007 Security Guide. It provides prescriptive Group Policy setting and security configuration recommendations to help strengthen the security of computers running the 2007 Microsoft Office release on computers that run Windows Vista or Windows XP in domain–based environments. It consists of multiple parts that you can use right away! Here's some info from the site itself:

The 2007 Microsoft Office Security Guide consists of the following components:

image • Executive Overview . This document summarizes for business and technical managers how the guidance and tools in this Solution Accelerator can benefit your organization.

• Security Guide . This guide describes the security model for the 2007 Microsoft Office release as well as new security features and functionality. It includes recommended guidelines and best practices for implementing security settings for two different environments—an Enterprise Client (EC) environment, which seeks to balance functionality and security and is appropriate for most organizations, and the Specialized Security – Limited Functionality (SSLF) environment, which is only appropriate for organizations that require very strong security at the expense of application functionality. SSLF settings restrict some application features.

• Threats and Countermeasures . This guide is a comprehensive technical reference that explains the security and privacy settings for the six referenced applications, their recommended configurations, and which threats they address. It also contains Common Configuration Enumeration (CCE) IDs for all the settings. CCE provides identifiers to system configurations to facilitate fast and accurate correlation of configuration data across multiple information sources and tools.

• Security Settings spreadsheet . This Office Excel spreadsheet lists security settings for the six referenced applications and their recommended configurations for the EC and SSLF environments, as well as Common Configuration Enumeration (CCE) IDs for all the settings.

• GPOAccelerator . This tool helps you automatically deploy security configurations for the 2007 Microsoft Office release across your organization. It can also be used to deploy security settings for Windows® XP and Windows Vista®.