Microsoft Office Mobile Apps Now Support Co-Authoring Encrypted Documents

Microsoft has announced that its Office mobile apps now support co-authoring documents encrypted with sensitivity labels. This capability has been available on the Office desktop and web clients for a while now, and it’s finally making its way to the iOS and Android versions of the app.

With the new co-authoring feature, the Microsoft Office app enables multiple mobile users to simultaneously edit protected Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents with AutoSave. This release should make it easier for co-workers to collaborate on the go while keeping their sensitive data secure and compliant.

“Multi-platform collaborative co-authoring is an essential component of MIP. As an intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data across your enterprise – in Microsoft 365 cloud services, on-premises, third-party SaaS applications, and more, MIP provides a unified set of capabilities to know your data, protect your data, and help prevent data loss across Microsoft 365 apps and services,” the company explained yesterday.

You can see how this new co-authoring feature works between an iPad and Android device on an encrypted document in the screenshot below.

Sensitivity Labels

An Office 365 sensitivity label is a type of tag that allows users to mark sensitive data (such as documents and spreadsheets) with various levels of confidentiality. This capability is available for high-end Microsoft 365 plans. The ability to co-author encrypted documents requires a sensitivity label to be applied to the Office file.

How to enable the co-authoring feature for Office files on mobile

Microsoft says that the new co-authoring experience is gradually rolling out in public preview to both iOS and Android users. To try out this feature, you will need to install the latest version of the Microsoft Office app (or the PowerPoint/Word/Excel apps) on iOS (version 2.58.207 or higher) and Android (version 16.0.14931 or higher) devices.

Keep in mind that Office 365 admins will need to enable the co-authoring feature in the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center. You can find more information about the co-authoring functionality on the Microsoft Information Protection encrypted documents support page.