Azure Information Protection Issues we have observed so far

[Manoj Karunarathne]

Hi Team,

Based from our experience in deployment and utilization of AIP here are the cons that we’ve observed so far. I'm wondering if there any workarounds or any plans to release in the roadmap ?

Non-O365 E3/E5 Customers (Who are using business premium)

• External Organization who are not Office 365 E3 or E5 users will not be able to View and Edit protected Office files such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
• External Organization who are not Office 365 E3 or E5 users will be able to View (only) the protected non-Office files such as .pdf (.ppdf) using the AIP Viewer.

Office 365 Business Edition:

Office 365 Business edition users with an add-on AIP (Plan 1 or 2) will be able to protect a document and send to recipients, but they will not be able to view (or edit) received protected Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). They will be able to view protected file such as .pdf (.ppdf) using AIP Viewer.

Non-Corporate Domains:

AIP does not currently support public domains (Gmail and Hotmail accounts for instance).

Non-Mac AIP Client:

AIP Viewer is currently supported on Mac OS while the AIP client is not.

AIP Viewer:

• AIP Viewer can only view certain type of files such as .pfile, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp, tif, tiff, gif, giff, pdf, ppdf, pjpg, pjpeg, pjpe, ppng, pbmp, pjfif, ptxt, pxml, txt, ptiff, ptif, pgiff, pgif (see screenshot below)
• AIP Viewer cannot view Office files (e.g. doc, xls). These type of files will be opened using their respective applications i.e. .doc file opens in Word, xls in Excel etc.
• When sending a protected document to a recipient for the first time and the recipient is not an Office 365 user, the recipient has to sign-up for RMS for Individual in order to view protected content. In the sign-up steps, the instructions will lead the recipient to download the AIP Viewer.

 Thanks in advance

Manoj

[#2]

Great feedback, just a few points, some of which you may know already:

The is dedicated forum for Azure Information Protection under Enterprise Mobility +Security that you might want to check out

There is an Azure Information Protection Product Feedback site where you can submit new ideas, or find out what being asked for already and if they are being worked on

The Yammer site for Azure Information Protection is great for getting direct responses from the Azure Information Protection team

Support for consumer email accounts (Gmail/Outlook) is in private preview, there was a great demo of it in last years Ignite.  Hopefully coming up for this year's Ignite, it will launch as a public preview.

For some of your other points, I'm not sure if that's the way its meant to work. I thought for organisations that weren't using Azure AD like what comes with Office 365 or other Microsoft services, RMS for individuals was an option but there is probably a lot more to it than that.