Patent ID: 8024304

Claim:
A method for document classification in a word processing document creation application comprising: providing a security classification toolbar within an extendable mark-up language (XML) based word processing document in the document creation application, the classification toolbar providing a first classification selection input; populating the first security classification selection input in the classification toolbar with a plurality of security classification selections based upon pre-defined security classification criteria, the pre-defined classification criteria defining the plurality of security classification selections available to a user of the document creation application; receiving a first security classification selection input from the plurality of security classification selection, selected by the user, from the first security classification selections populated in the toolbar; applying visual cues associated with the selected first security classification input, the visual cues presented within editable text portions of the document in the document creation application to provide visual indication within the text of the document to identify that the document has been security classified based upon the selected first security classification; assigning security classification properties to the document metadata embedded in the XML based word processing document identifying the first selected security classification input; and verifying that the first security classification property in the document has not been tampered by calculating a hash of document properties when the document is saved and subsequently comparing the hash on retrieval and opening of the document.