Policy tips not showing for Excel and Word clients

[Greg Tate]

We're evaluating Microsoft's DLP feature set. I enabled a DLP policy that with a single rule that keys on whether the content contains the built-in sensitivity type for IP address. Policy tips are enabled.

I have a fresh Azure AD domain-joined VM (not AD-joined) with Windows 10 20H2.  The Office version I'm using is 2101. My license is based on the E5 feature set from the M365 Developer Program.  But I can also reproduce this issue in our production environment that has standard O365 E5 and EM+S E5 licensing.

If I create a document, spreadsheet, or email and include an IP address, the policy tip shows in the online versions.  And it even shows in the Outlook client.  But the policy tips do not show in the Word or Excel clients.

Pere here, the Microsoft documentation indicates that "Office apps do not show policy tips that SharePoint Online site or OneDrive for Business sites have already determined should be shown on a file. As a result, you may not always see a DLP policy tip in the desktop apps that you see in SharePoint Online sites or OneDrive for Business sites"

I take this to mean that you're not getting policy tips in Word and Excel because their online versions already have a policy tip.  This hardly makes sense to me, as 99% of the user base uses the clients.  

Any guidance on what the standard behavior for policy tips on Word and Excel clients would be much appreciated!

Thank you!

[#2]

Hi Greg,

I have the same issue. When checking whether the DLP Policies have been deployed to the manage endpoint c:\users\<user>\appData\local\microsoft\Office\dlp\<tenant>\PolicyRules.XML, I can see they are not.

Forcing the update of the XML by deleting the XML, closing all Office apps, starting a new office app (e.g. Word) and saving it to OneDrive, doesn't include the newest policies I have defined.

I know that the policies work, since on the web clients the tips are shown.

[#3]

Hi @Andre_Schmidt and @Greg Tate,

Resurrecting an old post here, did you find a fix?

I've come across this today, the web apps show the policy tip file when DLP conditions are met but not the desktop clients where SPO/OD4B is the backend storage. According to the msdocs, we should see it in the message bar and back bar locations. I know this is an issue with Outlook but there is little on the other office apps. 

[#4]

@Greg Tate 

Resurrecting this post again because we're having the exact same issue. Created a brand new policy in Purview and it works in Office Online and the full Outlook client but not in the full Word/Excel/PowerPoint clients. I know the policy is working because we get an email saying that our sample PII data has been found.

Did you find a workaround? I haven't found anything that mentions this issue yet. 

If anyone from Microsoft sees this, this seems to be an issue and I find the DLP documentation a bit confusing: