OpenSource Sanitize

By Richard C. Belthoff Jr.

Reviewed by Richard C. Belthoff Jr., vice president and assistant general counsel at Wachovia Corp.
He can be reached via e-mail at richard.belthoff@wachovia.com.

Have you ever wanted to turn your collection of Microsoft Word contracts into forms for members of your firm to reuse, but couldn’t because it was just too massive a project to manually redact all the personal and confidential information? If so, OpenSource Sanitize might be the software program for you. It’s a quick and easy way to remove personal and confidential information from your Word files.

OpenSource Sanitize analyzes Word documents, removes any personal and confidential information it finds based on internal rules, and inserts reusable data fields where the personal and confidential information used to be.

Sanitizing Your Documents

You can use the program to sanitize a document in one of two ways: as a Word add-in or from the OpenSource Sanitize Web site. The Word add-in is easy to use, but the Web site approach allows you to modify your document after it has been redacted. Your customer account allows you to use either method.

Installing the Word add-in was easy for me, as it should be for a firm’s Information Technology department, which usually would install the program. After closing Word, just copy the “sanitize.dot” Word template file into your Word “Startup” folder (usually found somewhere below the “Documents and Settings” folder on your C: drive). When you restart Word, a new toolbar appears with two icons, one for configuring OpenSource Sanitize and the other for sanitizing a document.

To use the program from within Word, open the file to be sanitized. To set the location of the “Substitution Table,” click the “Configuration” icon. You can set it to appear at the beginning or at the end, or you can set it to be hidden.  The “Substitution Table” is a list of data fields the program inserted into your document in place of personal or confidential information. You only have to set the location for the substitution table once, unless you want a different location than your default.

To sanitize a document, click the “Sanitize Document” icon. OpenSource Sanitize then logs in to the company’s server and sends a copy of your document to the server (all analysis is done on the company’s server, so you are not using up your own computing power). When the analysis is done, the document will reopen in Word with the personal and confidential information removed.

To use the program on the Web, go to the company’s Web site and log on to your customer account. The toolbar on the left window pane allows you to import documents. You then can select “Sanitize.” When the analysis and redaction is complete, you will receive an e-mail. Just log back in to the document to see what the program removed. There will be a “Changes List” at the bottom of your screen allowing you to tweak the changes made by OpenSource Sanitize, including marking additional text for redaction and substitution with a data field. After you are done tweaking it, you can click “Finalize” to save your document changes.

A Few Considerations

Although OpenSource Sanitize is good, it doesn’t always recognize all personal or confidential information. If this happens and you are using the Web version, you can tweak individual documents. You also can advise OpenSource and the company will revise the recognition rules.

Entire contents copyright © 2005 James Publishing, Inc.

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OpenSource Sanitize on the Web.