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Deleting a Rights Policy Template

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Updated: October 22, 2009

Applies To: Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1

When you delete a rights policy template from the Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) cluster, content published using that template can no longer be consumed. As a best practice, you should back up the configuration database before deleting a rights policy template to ensure that you can recover rights-protected content if necessary.

An alternative to backing up the whole database is to archive the template that you want to stop using to add rights-protection to documents. Archiving a rights policy template will allow users to consume the content but not create new rights-protected content with the template. For more information about archiving templates, see Archiving a Rights Policy Template.

For AD RMS clients that are not running Windows Server® 2008 or Windows Server® 2008 R2, or clients for which the automatic rights policy template distribution has not been enabled, you must manually remove the rights policy template from a user's computer. If you do not remove the deleted rights policy template and someone uses it to publish content, AD RMS will not be able to issue any use licenses for the content, because it will not be able to locate the specified template in the configuration database.

Membership in the local AD RMS Template Administrators, or equivalent, is the minimum required to complete this procedure.

To delete a rights policy template

  1. At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type:

    Get-ChildItem -Path <drive>:\RightsPolicyTemplate

    where <drive> is the name of the Windows PowerShell drive. Note the ID of the rights policy template that you want to delete.

  2. Remove-Item -Path <drive>:\RightsPolicyTemplate\<template_ID>

    where <drive> is the name of the Windows PowerShell drive and <template_ID> is the ID of the template you found in the preceding step.

Tip

Rather than typing out the entire rights policy template ID on the command line, you can type the first few characters and then press the TAB key. Windows PowerShell will then complete the ID for you.

See Also

Concepts

Using Windows PowerShell to Administer AD RMS
Understanding the AD RMS Administration Provider Namespace
Configuring Rights Policy Templates

Other Resources

Understanding Rights Policy Templates
Understanding Rights Enforcement