I ran into an issue today that I couldn’t initially explain. Windows Vista ® (post SP1) comes with a feature that builds XPS viewing through IE. While great, it seemed to be having problems on a users machine. The first clue to troubleshooting was that XPS had come to the user in a RMS protected email and knowing that XPS is a RMS aware application led me to trying to figure out why the built in XPS viewer that comes with Vista (the .Net 3.0 framework that is in the OS at least) can’t open an RMS protected document. I found that on Windows 7 this is not a problem, the IE integrated XPSViewer.exe is no longer in the OS, and only the stand-alone version exists, though oddly it is now just called XPSViewer in Windows 7. For Windows Vista the stand-alone version is a separate update that must be downloaded and installed. The link, while easily bingable, is http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B8DCFFDD-E3A5-44CC-8021-7649FD37FFEE&displaylang=en.
That will install the XPS Viewer EP to read XPS Documents. The one that came with Vista SP1 can’t open RMS protected XPS files, it gives an error that the application crashed and should be restarted. This error is embedded in the IE window that got spawned when the user tried to open the XPS document.
The last change on the Windows Vista system that must be made is to change the default program for XPS file extensions to the XPS Viewer EP as opposed to XPSViewer.exe.
When opening a RMS protected XPS file in the new viewer, the user is first prompted to chose the account with which to open the file
After that selection, the document permissions are verified in the background and the file is opened with the rights granted to them by the sender of the email/document.
I hope this helps you troubleshoot any RMS and XPS integration you may have.
