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Security, Compliance, and Identity Blog
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Public Preview: “Default” label for a document library in SharePoint Online

Sanjoyan Mustafi's avatar
Jul 29, 2022

Before I describe the "how" let me describe the "why" first. Today, compliance admin can set a "default" label for users. Within Microsoft, we have a default label called "General" that is published to all employees. While this approach serves the purpose of labeling documents in a generic way but does not help in distinguishing a highly sensitive document from a low sensitive document "unless" the user labels the document manually. Automatic labeling works on a pattern and in several cases, you may not have any pattern. Like you created a site to launch a product and ALL the documents stored on the site are sensitive in nature. You don't want to rely on manual labeling by users as our data indicates people tend to just forget to label files. In such cases, this new feature will be of help. Once the library is configured with a default label SharePoint will guarantee that any "new" office files saved or uploaded to this library that do not have a label or even a label with low priority (applied before via automation or default) will be labeled with the configured library label. In other words, think of this feature as automatic labeling by location, where location is here is a library.

 

Note that if the uploaded document is manually labeled then it will not be touched. Moreover, if there are existing documents in the library then those will also not be touched unless a user edits the file. The stamping of the label is done in an asynchronous thread after the document is uploaded which means that there will be a delay of a few minutes before you see the label being applied automatically. If you are creating the document via the Office app on your Windows, Mac, or Mobile devices and directly do a "save-as" to SharePoint then the act of automatically applying the library label will wait till you close the app. For details read our official documentation

 

 

Licensing: This is a premium feature. The exact licensing details will be announced during GA (like OCT 2022). You can try this feature if you have Office 365 E5(or similar) license. You can use a trial license to try this as well. 

Updated Jul 28, 2022
Version 1.0
  • Skoel's avatar
    Skoel
    Copper Contributor

    The documentation is not very clear on the licensing part.

    What license is required for this other that the E5 bundle?

    Azure Information Protection P1/P2?

    E5 Information Protection and Governance?

     

  • Jonas Back The official docs says that the licensing details will be announced when the feature goes GA. As for now it seems E5 of any kind is sufficient. It's not enabled by default; you first have to match the prerequisites and then publish the label you want to use and choose the library it should be applied on. Only then will the default label be applied on documents not already labeled when being uploaded.

  • lukesrees's avatar
    lukesrees
    Copper Contributor

    Hi I have a couple of questions:

     

    Does this method supersede labelling documents in SharePoint via Defender for Cloud Apps?  secondly, I have set this up but when i upload a document, it doesn't appear to have a label applied until i open and close the document, is that expected behaviour?

     

    Many thanks,

  • Johno93's avatar
    Johno93
    Copper Contributor

    Is this feature available in all tenants? I have completed the prereqs but its not appearing in the library settings to select a label?

  • antonwestin's avatar
    antonwestin
    Copper Contributor

    Found in the documentation that this feature will require a Microsoft Syntex Advanced Management licence (subject to change since it's in preview). Is the license user based for the person who uploads the file or will it be based on the site admin/owner?

     

    And any news regarding the GA date on this feature?

     

     

  • Though I see the usefulness of this feature, a more useful feature would have been to have an option in the Site settings to set the default label to be auto applied to "any document library" created in the site.

     

    Currently for sensitive sites, we are using Purview to automatically apply default labels to any documents uploaded into any document library within the site.

     

    This is cumbersome, as the site collection owner needs to remember to let the compliance / infosec team know that auto labelling is needed.

  • Jonas Back's avatar
    Jonas Back
    Copper Contributor

    Sanjoyan Mustafi what Skoel said - what kind of E5 license is required? Since this seems to be on by default we really need to switch this off if not all our users are license compliant to use this feature.