Outlook Calendar Attachments to have limited access to just Required attendees

Question

The management team at my company often attaches documents (Word, Excel, PDFs) to their Outlook Calendar meeting requests. The meeting requests are sent to the managers, but also to their assistants. The desire is to have everyone be able to view the full meeting request and its content, but limit the ability to open the attachments to just the managers.

Is there a way in Outlook 2003 and/or 2007 to limit access to attachments that accompany meeting requests?

Ideally, can access to the attachments be controlled by the "Select Attendees and Resources" window when selecting individuals from the Global Address List. Can those in the Required field have access to the attachments while those in the Optional or Resources fields not have access?

My suggestion was to simply place all meeting attachments in a shared network folder that has read/write access limited to managers. They would then just place fully qualified links to those files in the body of the Meeting Request. While everyone would receive and see the links, only a few would have access. This, however, wasn't easy enough for them, so I'm looking for some other ideas.

Answer 1

I don't know any way to do this natively, but you could password protect the documents and give the password only to those who should open the documents. Pick a standard password and make it part of the process that the sender password protects the document with this standard password. Yes, it's klugey but it is a solution.

The only other thing I can think is to implement some type of DRM.

Answer 2

After extensive research and waiting a month for community feedback, I do not believe Outlook 2003 and/or 2007 can limit access to attachments that accompany meeting requests. There is no native solution.