The Documentation for Azure Information Protection has been updated on the web and the latest content has a January 2018 (or later) date at the top of the article.
For some, it’s been a quiet start of the year, and we have fewer than usual doc updates this month. However, we had an update to the Azure portal and as a result, you can now select each usage right individually for fine-grain control. Previously, some of the rights were bundled and if you needed to select them individually, you could only do so with PowerShell. There’s also a backend change that’s less obvious – group membership for scoped policies are now cached in the same way that group membership is cached for the Azure Rights Management service.
New to the docs: We’ve just added the help bot for Azure Information Protection. This is a pilot, so we very much encourage you to try it out and provide feedback. You can type a question or a keyword, and see if the bot knows the answer. If not, and you’re looking for information, the bot can help you search the docs. But if you have a technical problem, the bot can also open a support ticket for you.
The bot is still learning (“in baby phase”), so please be patient and if your question wasn’t answered, try again in a few days. Got your question answered? Give the bot a “thumbs up” so it knows it was a good answer for your question. Didn’t answer your question or answered a different question? Give the bot a “thumbs down” so it can learn and improve. To email feedback in general about the bot, type “feedback” in the bot.
We listen to your feedback and try to incorporate it whenever possible. Let me know if you have feedback about the documentation and I also encourage you to head over to our Yammer site to see what others are discussing.
What’s new in the documentation for Azure Information Protection, January 2018
Requirements for Azure Information Protection
– Updated the Firewalls and network infrastructure section, with a tip about how to quickly check whether your client-to-service connection is being terminated. For example, your firewall might be terminating the secured connections to do packet inspection. Kudos to Tom Moser from our Customer Success team for passing on this tip for how to check this from the client. Our friends in Office have also added a link to this section from their much-referenced Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges documentation.
Preparing users and groups for Azure Information Protection
– Updated the section about group membership caching. Previously, only the Azure Rights Management service cached group membership for performance reasons. Now, the Azure Information Protection service also caches membership for scoped policies. This is a “behind the scenes change” that you are unlikely to notice during normal use but will notice if you are in the testing phase and trying out different scoped policies.
Office 365: Configuration for clients and online services to use the Azure Rights Management service
– Updated the SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business: IRM Configuration section, to remove the reference to a preview sync client for IRM-protected libraries. This sync client is now generally available and the note now references the updated Office documentation, Enable users to sync IRM-protected files with the OneDrive sync client.
Configuring usage rights for Azure Rights Management
– Now that all usage rights are visible in the Azure portal, this page is updated to match.
Configuring and managing templates for Azure Information Protection
– With the recent Azure Information Protection service update, templates that are converted to labels no longer remove the Save As, Export (common name) usage right.
Tasks that you used to do with the Azure classic portal
– Updated the introduction note to confirm the retirement date of the Azure classic portal (Jan 8).
Installing Windows PowerShell for Azure Rights Management
– Removed the reference to the 32-bit version of the Azure Rights Management Administration Tool. With the latest version of the tool, only a 64-bit version is available to download.
Admin Guide: Install the Azure Information Protection client for users
– A new prerequisite that many customers are finding for the latest Office 2016 Click-to-Run versions: You might need to enable support for legacy monitors to prevent the Azure Information Protection bar from displaying outside the Office app.
Admin Guide: Using PowerShell with the Azure Information Protection client
– Updated the instructions in How to label files non-interactively for Azure Information Protection to reflect a recent change in Azure AD. Now, you must always grant permissions to the native app (step 12).