Office ProPlus

In a January 22 post, Microsoft announced a plan to boost Microsoft Search in Bing by including an extension to make Bing the search engine for Chrome for Office ProPlus users. Obviously no one outside Redmond thinks that this is a good idea as forcing users to embrace Bing is unlikely to be popular. But it might happen in mid-February when the next Monthly Channel update for Office ProPlus lands. Stay tuned for developments.

The September update of the Office ProPlus monthly channel delivers support for Office 365 sensitivity labels without the need to install the Azure Information Protection client. This is a step forward to make it easier for Office 365 users to be able to protect their most confidential information with encryption. More work remains to be done to upgrade the Office Online apps (including OWA), Outlook Mobile, and SharePoint and OneDrive. Will all this happen before Ignite?

Office ProPlus Version 1904 boasts new privacy controls and Microsoft has documented how it thinks about required and optional data collected from users. Office 365 still lacks privacy controls for the server apps. It remains to be seen if customers will be happy and consider that Microsoft has solved the GDPR issues identified in the Dutch DPIA report in November 2018.

Microsoft says that the Office desktop Windows apps will have native support for Office 365 sensitivity labels in the second half of 2019. Native support means that users won’t need to install the Azure Information Protection (AIP) client to apply labels. However, if they want to continue using the AIP client (because it is more functional), they need to deploy a system registry update.

Microsoft has announced that version 1904 of Office ProPlus (click to run) for Windows includes new privacy controls to allow organizations limit the data sent back by the Office apps. There’s no word about when they will deliver similar controls for Office for Mac, Office mobile, and the Office 365 server apps. Privacy is a real challenge in a world where cloud apps gather so much telemetry to measure performance, reliability, and other aspects, but it’s good that organizations will now be able to control how much they share with Microsoft.