During a recent seminar I gave located in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I discussed something called, "metadata". When I asked whether anyone ever heard of metadata, I was confronted with blank stares. This is exactly why I decided to write here about what it is and how it can impact your company.

Metadata is information that exists in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Metadata is simply “data about data”, and your electronic documents probably contain lots of it. Metadata describes document attributes such as the title, author, content, location, and date of creation.

Knowing this information can be helpful when cataloging electronic information. But metadata can also share confidential and potentially embarrassing information with an unintended audience. Would you want a potential customer of yours finding out historical data regarding the original author of the document you sent them? How many times it was edited? Who was editing the document? It’s possible….especially if you are a user of the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word.

So I'm sure all of you are thinking, "How do I keep this information from leaving the company?" One option for you is to pdf documents with a pdf creator program before sending it. A good free pdf creator is PDF995. You can download it for free at http://www.pdf995.com. There are enterprise level programs on the market that will clean this information from documents too if you'd prefer to just clean the document before you send it to someone. A good program to use is called Metadata Protect, by a company called Workshare. Metadata Protect allows corporations to set global policies on their computer network to lower the risk of dangerous metadata leaving the company.