Some recent announcements will make it much easier to work with PDFs protected with sensitivity labels. Adobe is now bundling the MIP plug-in with the Acrobat installer and has plans to allow users to apply sensitivity labels within Acrobat. But the big news is the change in Office applications to generate protected PDFs when saving, exporting, or sharing protected documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
In a surprising December 21 announcement, Microsoft put its Information Protection labeling client into maintenance mode effective January 1, 2022. Making an announcement as the IT industry was closing down for the holiday period is no good way to make certain customers learn about a development, and it’s curious that Microsoft left it until nine days before the client entered maintenance mode to let people know.
A change in how Office apps apply mandatory labeling as dictated by sensitivity label policies means that both new and old documents are processed. New documents have always been dealt with; the change being made ensures that Office apps detect the lack of a label when opening an existing document and will apply mandatory labeling at that point. It’s a change to help customers move on from the unified labeling client.
The Office 365 for IT Pros team will be at the European Collaboration Summit (ECS) in Dusseldorf. Come to listen to Tony talk about sensitivity labels on Tuesday or Paul discuss tenant to tenant migration on Wednesday. ECS is a great community-led event that’s well worth attending if you find yourself in Europe and have the ability to travel to Germany. Don’t forget your mask!
A recent conversation in the Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) community on Yammer about deleted templates led to a discussion about how this might affect users, like those who apply sensitivity labels with encryption to protect documents in SharePoint Online or email in Exchange Online. As it turns out, MIP has a backstop or get out of jail free card, but to understand how it works, you need to understand a little bit about publishing licenses and use licenses. We explain what happens in this article.
Licensing is everyone’s favorite topic. Combine it with information protection and governance and peoples’ eyes glaze over. Even so, it’s important to know what information protection and compliance features need which licenses as you don’t want to get into a position where something stops working because Microsoft enables some code to enforce licensing requirements. This post covers the basics of licensing and how Microsoft differentiates between manual processing and automated processing when deciding if a feature needs a standard or premium license.
The New Microsoft 365 Security for IT Pros eBook is now available from Gumroad.com. The book is modeled after Office 365 for IT Pros and covers the essential steps tenant administrators should take to secure and defend their organizations. Security is something that everyone involved in tenant administration needs to think about, so it’s good to have some solid advice from the pros.
A recent Teams Live Event hosted by Microsoft’s Information Protection team discussed the automatic assignment of sensitivity labels to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business content. A preview is now available and Microsoft hopes to make this functionality available at the end of March 2020. You’ll need Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 licenses.
Microsoft retracted the announcement of the deprecation of the classic Azure Information Protection client and label management in the Azure portal. Office 365 sensitivity labels have taken over from AIP clients in most tenants, so the impact of this change is limited. However, if you still need to use an AIP client, you should move to the unified version.
Microsoft announced that the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans will receive new Information Protection licenses. They’re preparing for the introduction of sensitivity labels and the increased use of encryption to protect access to content in Office 365 apps like SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. You don’t have to do anything to prepare for the new licenses, but it’s nice to know what they are and how the licenses are used.
On October 12, Microsoft and Adobe launched the public preview of the native integration of Azure Information Protection for PDF files. Knowledge about protection is built into the latest version of the Acrobat reader, meaning that third-party tools are no longer needed to process protected PDFs.