Azure Information Protection status update – June 2017

[Azure Information Protection Team]

First published on CloudBlogs on Jun 28, 2017
Hi Everyone, and welcome to the first post in what will be a regular series posting from the AIP team to ensure you always know what we are working on, what’s in the current releases of AIP and any other information that we can include to help you stay current. With that, I will hand over to Adam Hall who leads our Customer and Partner Engagement team. Dan. Hello to all our AIP customers and partners out there! My name is Adam Hall , and as Dan mentions above, I lead the team of awesome people who engage with you as our customers and partners to help you with what AIP is, key scenarios, and we are also the people who take your feedback , feature requests and blockers and ensure they are included as part of our engineering investments. This is the first post in what will now be a monthly release where we will summarize where we are today, what we are working on, and how you should expect us to deliver updates. AIP, as a cloud service has a set of components that get updated on an ongoing basis, including the services, admin portal and clients. These updates are all in support of shipping features and scenarios that you can use, and typically they all get updated together and become available as a complete feature. In the 9 months since we first released Azure Information Protection, we have shipped 4 GA updates , many service and admin portal updates and of course multiple Preview releases. Looking back, we have recently spent our time focusing on 2 key things:

• Strong focus on stability and consistency in the user experiences
• Unification of the admin portals, moving all admin functions to https://portal.azure.com

These updates were heavily influenced by your great feedback, and allowed us to ship new features, verify bug fixes and generally improved our product. We thank you for this ongoing engagement! As part of this engagement, we have heard many of you ask for a consistent and predictable release cycle for the AIP client , so you can plan, test, and roll out updates across your environments. You asked us to:

• Help us understand what you’re working on that is new or different in the next client version
• Help us understand when to expect the next AIP client so we can test the preview and plan for deployment

Based on these (very fair) asks, and to deliver a better product with greater stability, we will be moving to a communicated release cycle as follows:

1. We will provide you with more visibility for items that we are working on that are committed to be delivered. We will do this through this monthly series.
2. We will release a preview version (in most cases monthly ) to allow you to experiment with new features, test bug fixes and provide feedback on your experiences.
3. We will announce a GA level client each quarter which aggregates the new features & bug fixes from the recent preview versions.

So, based on all of this, here are the upcoming milestones:

• We are looking to release additional AIP Client Previews in July and August. You can download and test with the current Preview client (1.8.101.0) at https://aka.ms/aipclient
• Our next GA level client is planned to be released towards the end of September 2017. You can download and deploy the current GA client (1.7.210.0) at https://aka.ms/aipclient

We are working on 3 key streams for this next GA client release:

• Bug fixes and stability improvements (always!)
• Enriching automation in the client (detection of more information types through alignment with the Office DLP rules) and improved condition matching engine.
• Improving the Information Workers experiences (including a label action for ‘user defined permissions’ and a new labeling experience via the ‘protect’ menu for organizations that want to minimize the information protection bar)

Additionally, we have adopted UserVoice as a platform for you to tell us what we should be working on, and I would ask and encourage you all to take a look and place your votes to help us understand the priorities you have.

Summary

Hopefully this helps you with your testing, planning and deployments, we welcome your commentary and feedback. We also know this can be a lot to absorb, and we are here to help! Engage with us on Yammer or Twitter and let us know what’s important to you by voting on UserVoice ! It really is very easy to get started with AIP. We have a lot of information available to help you, from great documentation to engaging with us via Yammer and e-mail. What are you waiting for? Get to it!

• Download the new unified client from our Download Center
• Start a trial and kick the tires
• Learn more about Information Protection
• Get deep technical and scenario documentation

Thank you, Dan Plastina on behalf of our enthusiastic Azure IP team. Twitter: @DanPlastina Useful links: https://aka.ms/DanPlastina (PDF)