Announcing the 2007 Microsoft Office Security Guide

The 2007 Microsoft Office Security Guide is live, and you can check it out on the TechNet Security Center. This solution accelerator can help you keep users productive and help secure your systems and data. It will help you to determine how to set the hundreds of security and privacy settings available with the 2007 Office system, balancing your organization's requirements for security and functionality. 

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

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.