Privacy supplement for Microsoft Office Project 2007

Last updated: October 2006

This page is a supplement to the Privacy Statement for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. In order to understand the data collection and use practices relevant for a particular Office program or service, you should read both the Privacy Statement for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and this supplement.

Linking to pictures and other documents

If you choose to create a link to an image, file, data source, or other document on your hard disk or on a server, the path to that file is saved into your document. In some cases, the link may include your user name or information about servers on your network. In the case of a data connection, you can choose to save a user name or password within the data connection link.

Also, when you apply an XML Schema to a document, a path to the XML Schema that you have created is saved to the document. In some cases, that path may include your user name.

Printing

When you print a Microsoft Office Project 2007 project file and then save that file, Office Project 2007 saves the path to your printer with the file. In some cases, the path may include a user name or computer name.

Document Workspace sites

With Office Project 2007, you can access a Document Workspace site on a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services site. A Document Workspace site is a shared space where you can quickly and easily collaborate with other team members on one or multiple documents.

When you access a Document Workspace site, Office Project 2007 downloads some data from the Document Workspace site to provide you with information about that site. Specifically, Office Project 2007 obtains the following:

• Name of the Windows SharePoint Services site

• URL or address of the site

• Names, e-mail addresses, and permission levels of the site users

• Lists of the documents, tasks, and other information available from the site

Office Project 2007 also stores a list of the Windows SharePoint Services sites that you have visited on your computer, in the form of cookies. This list is used to provide you with quick access to the sites that you have visited before. The list of sites that you have visited is not accessed by Microsoft and is not exposed to the Internet unless you choose to make the list more broadly available.

Windows SharePoint Services

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provides shared, Web-based Workspace sites where you can collaborate on documents or meetings.

When you access a SharePoint site, by using either the Web browser or any Office program, the site will save a cookie to your computer if you have permissions to create a new subsite on that site. Taken together, these cookies form a list of sites to which you have permissions. This list is used by several Office programs to provide you with quick access to the sites that you have visited before.

The list of sites that you have visited is not accessed by Microsoft and is not exposed to the Internet unless you choose to make the list more broadly available.

You can clear this list by using your Web browser to clear your cache of cookies.

In Windows SharePoint Services, when you create a new Web site or list, or add or invite people to an existing Web site or list, the site saves the following for each person, including you:

• Full name

• E-mail address

• User logon name (Microsoft Windows NT logon — for example, DOMAIN\user name)

A user ID will be added to every element that you or the other users of the site add to or modify on the site. As with all of the content on the SharePoint site, only administrators and members of the site itself should have access to this information.

All elements of the SharePoint site include two fields: Created By and Modified By. The Created By field is filled in with the user name of the person who originally created the element and the date when it was created. The Modified By field is filled in with the user name of the person who last modified the Office Project 2007 document and the date when it was last modified.

Administrators of the servers where SharePoint sites are hosted have access to some data from these sites, which is used for analyzing the usage patterns of the site and improving the percentage of time that the site is available. This data is available only to the server administrators and is not shared with Microsoft unless Microsoft is hosting the SharePoint site. The data specifically captured includes the names, e-mail addresses, and permissions of everyone with access to the site.

All users with access to a particular SharePoint site may search and view all content available on that site.

Auditing

Windows SharePoint Services provides auditing features that allow administrators to keep a reliable audit trail of how users are working with important content.

When Windows SharePoint Services administrators enable the Auditing feature, the server will automatically record in the SharePoint Content Database certain actions performed by the user. These actions include view, edit, check-in, and check-out. For each recorded action, the server will record identifying information about the file, the action, and the user's SharePoint ID and IP address. No data is sent to Microsoft as part of this transaction.

This feature is off by default and is available only to administrators of SharePoint sites where content is stored.

Where your name may be stored

In certain instances, Office Project 2007 stores your name to provide you with a better experience when using some features. For example, your name is stored in these locations:

• Author fields

• AuthorName file property

You can remove your name from these fields by using the Remove Personal Information from File Properties option. For information about this feature, see the topic Remove personal or hidden information.

Microsoft Office solutions created by other companies may also include your name or other personal information in the custom properties associated with your file.

If you use the Microsoft Office Web Control, Microsoft Office Excel Data Access, DataCalc, or other features that allow you to connect directly to another data source, your authorization information (user ID and password) may be saved within your document. To change or delete this authorization information, you will need to change the properties of the connection appropriately.

Instant messaging and notifications

Office Project 2007 provides you with the ability to send instant messages from within the program itself and provides you with the ability to be alerted when people are online or when certain changes are made to shared documents or workspaces.

Office Project 2007 uses a Microsoft instant messaging client to provide you with the ability to see the online presence of other people and to send messages to them. Office Project 2007 includes a Web control that allows the instant messaging presence to be displayed within a Web page. The purpose of this feature is to allow you to use Web pages to collaborate directly with other people who are working on the same documents or workspaces.

Web page scripts that are written with this Web control in mind can transmit presence data from your instant messaging program to the Web server hosting the script. By default, this functionality is enabled only for intranet sites, trusted sites, and sites on the local computer.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services pages and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 pages both make use of this control. Neither of these types of pages transmits presence data back to the Web server.

When you visit a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services site or an Office SharePoint Server site and create an alert, Office Project 2007 will add a cookie to your computer with the following data:

• Name of the site

• URL of the site

• Whether the alert source is a Windows SharePoint Services site or a SharePoint Server site

• URL used by the site to expose the alert service

The data in this cookie allows alerts from the site to be sent to you correctly. Microsoft does not access this cookie unless the cookie was sent originally from a Microsoft server, in which case the cookie is used exclusively by the Windows SharePoint Services site or SharePoint Server site.