The User is Responsible for Metadata Removal

Document Inspector’s lack of extensive out of the box extensive metadata management ability is not suited for an enterprise-metadata management approach. The onus is on individual users to “inspect” their documents and then decide what to remove.

With the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relating to electronically stored information, relying on Document Inspector places the company or firm at risk of “…inadvertent production of privileged information.” A firm should decide how to manage a document’s electronic information (metadata) from an enterprise-wide approach, not the individual users.

Introduction to Document Inspector

The Document Inspector is Microsoft’s response to the market’s outcry about the hidden data that can so easily be stored in a Microsoft Office document. When sharing these files outside of a company or firm, there is risk of disclosing unintentionally discoverable, confidential or hidden information that might be adverse to client representation or, at least, extremely embarrassing. Prior to Office 2007 Document Inspector, Microsoft provided a metadata removal tool (called the Hidden Data tool) that was barely usable and kludgy at best. The Office 2007 Document Inspector was a needed addition.

With the advent of Microsoft Office 2007 (Office 2007) and the addition of the Document Inspector, many firms are asking whether there’s a need for an additional metadata management application.

Has Microsoft, in one single blow, nullified many companies’ investment in a metadata management application?

If metadata management is now built-in, why use another application?

I’m going to tell you 10 reasons I believe firms should not rely on Document Inspector but should still consider investing in a metadata management application.

Reason 1. Document Inspector Has Too Many Steps

Microsoft’s idea behind the Document Inspector is to provide a central location for users to view Office 2007 documents for personal, hidden, or sensitive information. To view or remove this information a user can use the built-in Document Inspector and an organization could, conceivably, extend the Document Inspector (see Figure 1) with additional development using the Document Inspector Object Model.

To View the Document Inspector

• Click the Office Button
• From the drop-down menu select Prepare
• From the list to the right select Inspect Document

Figure 1

The Document Inspector is Composed of Three Modules

The Document Inspector is composed of three modules users can employ to inspect and remove specific metadata from the document – Office 2007 Word Document Inspector, Office 2007 Excel Document Inspector, and Office 2007 PowerPoint Document Inspector

Metadata Elements Discovered by Document Inspector for Word 2007:

• Comments
• Revision marks from tracked changes
• Document version information
• Ink annotations
• Document properties, including information from the Summary, Statistics, and Custom tabs of the Document Properties dialog box
• E-mail headers
• Routing slips
• Send-for-review information
• Document server properties
• Document Management Policy information
• Databinding link information for databound fields (last value will be converted to text) Note: Does not handle some linked fields such as IncludeText,
• User name
• Template name
• Text that is formatted as hidden (a font effect that is available in the Font dialog box)

Metadata Elements Discovered by Document Inspector for Excel:

• Comments
• Ink annotations
• Document properties, including information from the Summary, Statistics, and Custom tabs of the Document Properties dialog box
• E-mail headers
• Routing slips
• Send-for-review information
• Document server properties
• Document Management Policy information
• User name
• Printer path information
• Scenario comments
• File path for publishing Web pages
• Comments for defined names and table names
• Inactive external data connections
• Information in worksheet headers
• Information in worksheet footers
• Hidden rows
• Hidden columns that contain data
• Objects that are not visible because they are formatted as invisible

Metadata Elements Discovered by Document Inspector for PowerPoint

• Comments
• Ink annotations
• Document properties, including information from the Summary, Statistics, and Custom tabs of the Document Properties dialog box
• E-mail headers
• Routing slips
• Send-for-review information
• Document server properties
• Document Management Policy information
• File path for publishing Web pages
• Objects that are not visible because they are formatted as invisible
• Text that was added to the Notes section of a presentation
• Custom XML data that might be stored within a presentation

Removing Metadata from the Office 2007 Document

Once the user selects Inspect (see Figure 1), the Document Inspector dialog box displays the type of metadata found in the document. After displaying the metadata in a particular document the Document Inspector provides buttons to remove the metadata (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Once the user selects which metadata to remove, they can recheck the document for metadata by selecting the Reinspect button (see Figure 2)

Give me a break!

One of the most useful features of Word is the Organizer and what did Microsoft do with it? They buried it under a pile of commands and buttons. Yea…real intuitive.

Here’s how you dig to China to get to it.

1. On the Home Tab of the Ribbon click the Styles button
2. At the of the Style List Dialog box there’s 3 buttons
3. Click on the rightmost button which is Manage Styles (what?)
4. Click the Import/Export… Button

What the …? Yea that’s real easy.

Forget that… here’s one line of code you can place in your Normal template or global template and then assign it a keyboard shortcut. Much easier.

Sub ShowOrganizer()
Dialogs(wdDialogOrganizer).Show
End Sub

Here’s some VBA code that updates all the TOCs you may have in your document. There may be times when you need to update the TOCs in a document before some method you want to run.

Notice the “Step -1″? This enumerates through TOC starting with the last one first – something I learned the hard way!

Sub UpdateTOCs()
Dim x As Integer
For x = ActiveDocument.TablesOfContents.Count To 1 Step -1
ActiveDocument.TablesOfContents.Item(x).Update
Next x
End Sub

I love that fact that Microsoft Office document metadata has metamorphosed from “get rid of” to “let’s manage”. I saw this trend three years ago. That is why at Esquire Innovations, we’ve always talked in terms of “managing metadata” instead of emphasizing the removal of the document metadata. We emphasize an “enterprise document metadata policy” approach. Each firm needs to think and plan how document metadata is managed as it leaves the boundaries of the firm, i.e. email.

So we are now walking the talk and offering document metadata services to help address the changing needs of our iScrub clients. These services help our clients in three ways:

1. Assist in making the best use of iScrub by training on the advanced features of the product.
2. Help to explore the myriad of other possibilities of managing document metadata.
3. Analyze the firm’s metadata approach and adjust the software to better fit their requirements.

For more information check out our press release – Esquire Innovations Announces Metadata Policy Services

CAUTION: There are fields in all versions of Microsoft Word that contain linked data in the form of text, pictures or hyperlinks that can reference files on a server that Microsoft Office 2007 Document Inspector does not remove or unlink (turn the field to text).

Examples of Linked Fields that are not removed from a doument using the Microsoft Office 2007 Document Inspector:

• { HYPERLINK “\\\\PRODEV\\People\\JDoe\\DOCS-” \l “609447-v18-Bylaws.DOC” }

• { INCLUDEPICTURE \\\\ PRODEV \\People\\ JDoe\\iRedlineLogo.gif” \* MERGEFORMAT }

• { LINK Equation.3 \\\\ PRODEV \\People\\ JDoe\\iRedlineLogo.gif” \p }

• { INCLUDETEXT “\\\\ PRODEV \\People\\ JDoe\\DOCS-#609447-v18-Bylaws.DOC” \* PRODEV }

Whatever metadata management program you use for your organization, the ability to remove databinding objects is a must.

As expected, we didn’t see the legal domain making a mad rush to Microsoft Office 2007 in the first quarter of 2008 and I don’t expect the spigot to open any more for the second and third quarters. What I predict is that the conversion to Office 2007 will begin to happen towards the end of this year and the flood gates will open in 2008 and go strong all year. Why? The new internationally approved XML file format will be the driver.