SharePoint IRM & AIP; Differences and Configuration

[Andrew O'Young]

Hello TechCommunity Friends!

Have a client that has had a SPO Classic Site and New Communication Site created by a third party with IRM enabled.

Their goal is to be able to upload PDFs to the Communication Site that cannot be downloaded or printed, problem with IRM is that they are unable to open the PDFs in Adobe Reader (preferred) which tells them they need to use other application or use AIP.

When they open in e.g. Foxit it applies a Watermark (not configured to do this).

They have requested AIP be looked into since it is included in their E3 subscription.

Jumping into their Azure Portal, enabled AIP and can see the following is created, but not sure whether this is because IRM was already configured? (Believe you can convert IRM labels to AIP labels):

Looking at the Document Library for the Communication Site, there does not appear to be a place for AIP to be configured.

Does IRM need to be disabled? Will this version of AIP achieve what the client wants?

Have watched Atul's demo and gone through docs. but not sure on where to go from here.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

There's nothing to configure on SPO side, it doesn't "interact" directly with AIP and only supports IRM/RMS, which is a big letdown and something we've been asking to be looked into for years now.

Anyway, if you want to protect documents with AIP, simply create/publish the labels then apply it via the client. There are some instructions here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/protect-sharepoint-online-files-with-azure-inf...

Do note the "important notes" section in this article, as there are severe implications of applying an AIP level to documents stored in SPO.

[#3]

Oh, and E3 does not include AIP, just some components of it (basically what was previously known as Azure RMS). Here's a comparison page for the different plans: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/information-protection/

[#4]

Hi Vasil,

Thank you for the advice, appreciated as always :)