At the Microsoft Ignite conference in September 2018, we announced the unified labeling platform. Since then, we’ve released public previews of the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client. Today we’re announcing that the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client is now generally available (GA), and we encourage you to start using it in your production environment.
Getting started
Releasing the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client is an important step towards enhancing the integration across Microsoft Information Protection solutions. This enables admins to manage all workloads from one admin center, the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center like all other Microsoft Information Protection workloads, including configuring and managing your sensitivity labels and protection policies.
The new unified labeling client includes several features to help you better protect your sensitive information, such as end-user driven manual labeling, automatic labeling and recommended labeling.
The unified labeling client is fully aligned with the 90+ sensitive information types found in the Microsoft 365 Compliance center and also supports custom sensitive information types, keyword dictionaries and complex conditions:
- Custom sensitive information types allow you to create your own information types such as employee ID numbers, add keywords and set custom confidence levels.
- Keyword dictionaries – admins can upload their own dictionary of terms that they want to automatically detect in documents and emails.
- Complex conditions - allows you to use grouping and logical operators (AND, OR); you choose the logical operator between the sensitive information types within a group and between the groups.
Figure 1: Setting complex conditions for automatic labeling
These new capabilities help you to reduce the number of false positives, make your conditions more flexible, and make automatic labeling much more accurate.
Which client is right for me?
New customers: start with the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client.
Existing Azure Information Protection customers: review the comparisons between the Azure Information Protection client and the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client, in addition to the list of unsupported features and choose the client that meets your business requirements.
Note that going forward new features will be included in the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client whereas we’re not planning to add new features to the Azure Information Protection client.
Mixed environments are supported so you can run the Azure Information Protect client, Azure Information Protection scanner, and the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client side-by-side.
In addition, the Azure Information Protection unified labeling supports seamless upgrade from the Azure Information Protection client.
If you are an existing Azure Information Protection customer using Azure Information Protection client features that are not yet supported by the Azure Information Protection unified labeling client (for example, user-defined permissions, HYOK, and advanced settings) we recommended that you wait for future Azure Information Protection unified labeling client releases.
Additional information
The latest client version with these new capabilities can be found here. For more detailed information, see the version release information.
You feedback is valuable and allows us to understand better what you need to help you in your information protection strategy. We encourage you to try the new features and share your feedback using our Yammer community.
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