M365 Changelog: Co-authoring on Microsoft Information Protection encrypted documents in Office Desktop is Generally Available

MC285023 – Co-authoring on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents encrypted with Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels on Windows and Mac is now generally available. This feature is already available on Office on the web

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 82112.

When this will happen

This is now generally available.

How this will affect your organization

Microsoft Information Protection enables you to protect your most sensitive content using an integrated, unified, and intelligent approach including the ability to apply encryption to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents using sensitivity labels. With this unique capability, multiple users can now edit these documents in real-time with AutoSave, empowering teams do their best work while maintaining the protection across the document lifecycle

What you need to do to prepare

• Deploy the latest Current Channel or Monthly Enterprise Channel updates of Office. Microsoft highly recommends using Configuration Manager and Servicing Profiles to ease this transition
• If your organization uses Azure Information Protection to apply labels in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Windows, make sure to also update to the latest version
• Navigate to the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center settings page to enable the feature

This feature requires all clients working on Office files to have updated capabilities for supporting the new metadata changes for sensitivity labels. Any third-party or custom solutions interacting with sensitivity labels may also need to be updated. You can read more about this feature here.Additional informationBlog