SharePoint Online Site Classification- Any early guidance or references?

[Darian Glover]

Does anyone have any guidance or references to how site classification will be implemented for SharePoint Online sites? It is looking like classifications will first have to be set up in AzureAD for the Office 365 tenant and then somehow applied to existing and new sites, along with some manner of managing classifications- e.g. Ooops, this site isn't low business impact (LBI), it is actually high business impact (HBI).

I ask because I must manage all of my organization's sites and right now the only method we have for "classification" is applying a background watermark. This is far from ideal since any site administrator can blow away the watermark by changing the site theme. Also, our governance allows unique permissions down to the list/library level, so we would love to be able to classify a list/library differently than the site. One business case is a team working on an annual report. Everyone is contributing, but only a few are to have access to the financial numbers/charts/tables up until a few weeks before publication.

The only reference I can easily find is: Enhanced conditional access controls, encryption controls and site classification in SharePoint and OneDrive

https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/enhanced-conditional-access-controls-encryption-controls-and-sit...

FYI: Our organization has turned off Groups and has no forseeable plan to use them given the lack of management controls. So I'm only interested in SharePoint Online sites.

[#2]

If I'm not mitaken, Site Clasiffication relies on Groups so if you have disabled Groups you are not going to be able to use it

[#3]

Not all sites are assocated with Groups. So, if the Groups feature needs to be enabled for site classification, is classification going to be limited to only sites associated with groups?

[#4]

To be more precises: Sites clasiffication is a feature of Modern Team Sites that currently are linked to Groups

[#5]

That indicates that there will be no way to apply categories to pre- and non-Groups sites and thus no ability to make use of information governance and security policies for such sites. This would be unfortunate.

[#6]

For now that's the reality, but in the coming months this could change

[#7]

So this article was recently updated on 12/21/2016. Anyone have any idea if the two activities, custom classifation and built-in site classification are compatible?

Implement a SharePoint Site Classification Solution

Even with good governance, SharePoint sites can proliferate and grow out of control. Sites are created as they are needed, but are rarely deleted. Search crawl is burdened by unused site collections, and search produces outdated and irrelevant results. Site classification allows you to identify and preserve sensitive data. This article shows you how to use the Core.SiteClassification sample to implement a site classification solution, as well as use SharePoint site policies to enforce deletion. You can integrate this solution into your existing site provisioning solution to better manage your sites.

Full Article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/implement-a-sharepoint-site-classification-solution

[#8]

This works OK on Classic site pages, but the new Modern pages do not allow JSLink or other JS injection, and the pasge elements are different. Framework Extensions may be the solution for the future, but what would it take to implment the same capability that the Team Sites for O365 Groups uses, or add a way to display the classificaiton based on a property bag setting or similar value?