Microsoft Toughens Premium Sensitivity Label License Requirements

Make Sure You Have the Right Information Protection Licenses

According to Microsoft 365 message center notification MC736438 (13 March 2024), Microsoft plans to take a more robust attitude to requiring administrators and users to have premium licenses to apply sensitivity labels automatically via policies or by defining a default sensitivity label for SharePoint Online document libraries. Until now, Microsoft has had a published license requirement that administrators should have complied with. In early April 2024, software checks will ensure that the right license is in place before automatic labeling works.

Microsoft says that they’re issuing the notification “as a reminder to ensure your admins and users who use Information Protection sensitivity labels have the required licenses.” In other words, it’s time to make sure that people have the right licenses before code stops them doing something that they’ve been doing for some time.

Manual Versus Automatic Labeling

The basic difference between manual labelling and automatic labeling comes down to licensing. Manual labeling means that a user chooses and assigns a sensitivity label to a document without any assistance. Automatic labeling means that code decides when to apply a sensitivity label. Manual labeling always takes precedence as a user can decide to assign a different label to a document that receives a sensitivity label through policy.

The basic rule is that to use manual labeling, a user account must have an Office 365 E3 or above license. To use automatic labeling, they need Office 365 E5 or above. Variations exist, so it’s wise to check the current documentation setting out license requirements for sensitivity labels.

Information Protection License Enforcement

Microsoft implemented the license requirement for new tenants in January 2024. They’ve allowed older tenants an extra three months’ grace period to sort their licenses out. Of course, it’s human nature to ignore anything unpleasant until it’s absolutely necessary to deal with it. That point is fast approaching as the existing functionality will continue working until early April 2024 and terminate thereafter.

Microsoft says that if administrator accounts that manage sensitivity labels do not have the required licenses, they will be unable to manage sensitivity labels and policies. I think this overstates the case. An Office 365 E3 license allows an administrator to create, update, and publish sensitivity labels. It does not allow them to publish labels in an auto-labeling policy, and that’s a totally different scenario to what you might term regular sensitivity label management. In addition, existing auto-labeling policies will continue to run. They just can’t be updated by administrators without the necessary licenses.

Microsoft goes on to say that if end users do not have the required licenses “they will no longer be able to apply labels.” Again, this statement appears to be misleading. Users with Office 365 E3 licenses have the right to manually apply sensitivity labels to files stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business and to Exchange Online messages. What they will lose is the ability to assign a sensitivity label automatically to new content when a document library has a defined default sensitivity label. Although I haven’t seen the new behavior in action, I imagine that SharePoint Online will ignore the default label and leave it to the user to assign a label.

The Point of Licensing

Quibbling about what will happen is all very well. What’s obvious is that Microsoft is implementing software checks to restrict Purview functionality to those who have the preordained licenses. There’s nothing to complain about here. Microsoft sets the licensing rules and you either pay up for premium functionality or use whatever’s covered by the licenses held by the tenant.

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