Office 365 Sensitivity Labels

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…

Great to Protect Content Until Access is Needed The growing popularity of sensitivity labels is goodness if you simply look at the desirability of protecting confidential information. However, the presence of a larger percentage of encrypted data within Office 365 creates some addition management challenges. As I have noted during several conference talks, the only…

Rights Management and Protection Sensitivity Labels are built using Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) and are available to Office 365 users with E3 or above licenses. When a label protects a file or message with encryption, the ability to decrypt the item to reveal its content is governed by the rights assigned to the recipient as…

Time to Review How Sensitivity Labels Are Used In Scoping Sensitivity Labels, I discuss the evolution of sensitivity labels and the ability to scope a label so that it deals with files and messages, container management, or both. Given this new capability, I questioned if it is a good idea to have multi-purpose labels and…

Controlling Access to Sensitive Content A recent Microsoft Technical Community article covers how to use Azure AD Privileged Identity Management to control access to the super-user permission for Azure Information Protection. An account holding super-user permission can access any content protected (encrypted) by an Azure Information Protection or Office 365 sensitivity label. I don’t intend…

The Evolution of Sensitivity Labels When Microsoft launched sensitivity labels in late 2018, the implementation was simple: you defined labels that could mark and protect Office files and email and published them to users, who then applied the labels as needed. Over time, Microsoft has increased the usefulness of sensitivity labels by building native support…

Expanding the Control of Sensitivity Labels In a Teams live event to brief customers on July 14, Microsoft revealed details of how they plan to evolve the container settings in sensitivity labels to exert more control over SharePoint Online sites. Microsoft also plans to improve the flow of creating new sensitivity labels to create “label…

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels are supported by Teams, Groups, and Sites, but some work is needed if you want to replace older text-only classification labels with Office 365 Sensitivity Labels. This article explains how to use PowerShell to update Office 365 groups with new sensitivity labels. The labels are then synchronized to teams and sites.

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels can now be applied to “containers” – Teams, Office 365 Groups, and SharePoint sites. Sensitivity labels replace the old text-only classifications that have been available since 2016. The labels don’t affect the contents of the containers, but they can control some container settings, like whether a team allows guest access or if it’s open to any tenant user to join. It’s yet another development in the label and protection story for Office 365.