With hybrid work here to stay, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to facilitate seamless collaboration among workgroups and across organizations while keeping their data secure and compliant. Today, we’re announcing a unique capability from Microsoft Information Protection in Microsoft 365 that empowers you to do just that. Co-authoring on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents encrypted with sensitivity labels is now generally available for Windows and Mac. This feature is already available on Office on the web.
Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) is 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 (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) and services (e.g., Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange).
With Microsoft 365, when sensitivity labels are used to encrypt Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents, multiple users can now edit these documents in real-time with AutoSave, empowering teams to do their best work while maintaining protection across the document lifecycle.
Figure 1. Office users on Windows and Mac co-authoring on a documented encrypted with a 'Confidential Project' label
To get started –
- Deploy the 2107 update of Office (or higher) using the Current Channel or Monthly Enterprise Channel. We highly recommend 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 as a global admin 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. So, plan ahead to get the best results. You can read more about this feature here.
Microsoft Information Protection offers powerful capabilities to classify and secure sensitive information. With the co-authoring capability we are announcing today, MIP users no longer have to compromise between security and productivity
Paras Kapadia, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Office 365
*This capability is available with any license for "manual sensitivity labeling" as specified in the Microsoft 365 licensing guidance for security and compliance. Support on mobile coming soon.
This article was updated on 1/12/2022 to correct the licenses that enable this capability
Microsoft
