Information Barriers - Student/Staff Content

[vw1979]

We are a career center school and we use Teams, Sharepoint and OneDrive with our students and staff.  I believe Information Barriers is the correct tool to resolve the concerns that we have, but I am struggling to find a definitive answer on one question that has come up.  

In our scenario, we are looking to restrict students from seeing documents and information that is only meant for staff.  We are a single tenant, so this is difficult to accomplish with the other tools available.  My question has to do with content that is staff created but meant to be shared with students.  

So in our scenario we would not want an internal document on student discipline procedures to be searchable or available to students, but we do want all staff to have access.  Howerver, if an instructor creates a document for her class, we do want her to be able to share that with her class.

Is it possible to use IB's and still allow teachers the ability to share with the students through Teams classrooms?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @vw1979,

It is possible to leverage Information Barriers (IB) in Microsoft 365 while still enabling teachers to share content with students through Teams classrooms.

Information Barriers are policies within Microsoft 365 that compliance administrators can set up to restrict users from communicating and collaborating with each other.
When using Information Barriers with OneDrive, there are various supported modes:

- Open: Users can share files and folders based on the applied Information Barrier policy and OneDrive sharing settings.
- Owner Moderated: Only the OneDrive owner can share the site and its content according to their IB policy.
- Explicit: User segments and compatible segments can be associated with the user's OneDrive for sharing.
- Mixe*: A segmented user's OneDrive can be shared with unsegmented users, and the site's IB mode can be set as Mixed.

In your specific case, you could establish an Information Barrier to prevent students from accessing staff-only documents. To share content with students, teachers could use the "Owner Moderated" or "Mixed" mode to selectively share documents with their classes.

Here are some useful links:
Use information barriers with OneDrive | Microsoft Learn
Information barriers | Microsoft Learn

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Kindest regards,

Leon Pavesic
(LinkedIn)