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. Work is more flexible than ever, and employees now regularly use multiple devices to collaborate asynchronously and stay productive throughout their day. Mobility is a key piece of this story, and today we're announcing full cross-platform support for seamless secure collaboration in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Co-authoring on documents protected with Microsoft Purview Information Protection is now generally available for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Office Mobile applications on Android and iOS devices. Documents encrypted with Sensitivity labels in Microsoft Purview Information Protection can now be opened and edited at the same time by multiple users. The feature is already generally available for Office Desktop applications (Windows and Mac) and Office for the Web. Changes to documents are AutoSaved and shared with other collaborators in real-time, while the protections enforced by the label are correctly honored across these endpoints.
At Microsoft, our goal is to provide a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data across your digital estate – in Microsoft 365 cloud services, on-premises, third-party SaaS applications, and more. With Microsoft Purview Information Protection, we are building a unified set of capabilities for data classification, labeling, and protection not only in Office Apps, but also in other popular productivity services where information resides (e.g., SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Teams), as well as endpoint devices.
Figure 1: Co-authoring between an iPad and Android device on a document encrypted with a "Confidential" label
To use this feature:
- Install or update Office Mobile, Word, Excel or PowerPoint to version 16.0.14931 or higher on Android or version 2.58.207 or higher on iOS
- Ensure that the 'Co-authoring for files with sensitivity labels' setting is enabled for your tenant in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal (Global admin rights required). If you have already enabled this setting, the feature will start working automatically for the above versions of Office apps.
You can learn more about this feature here. This capability is available with any license for "manual sensitivity labeling" as specified in the Microsoft 365 licensing guidance for security and compliance to customers in our Worldwide and Government environments.
This feature is now also available for Office applications on Windows in the Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel starting with the 2202 update. With these updates, you can now collaborate on documents encrypted with Microsoft Purview Information Protection on any device, platform or flavor of Office supported by Microsoft 365.
Paras Kapadia, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft 365 Apps
Raghuram Belur, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft 365 Apps
Microsoft
