Microsoft announces the general availability of Azure Information Protection December update

Microsoft yesterday announced the general availability of Azure Information Protection December update. Apart from the below-listed features which were previously announced, Microsoft announced two new collabration feature.

• Scoped Policies so you can make labels available to users based on group membership
• A new, unified Windows client that combines the RMS Sharing app features into the Azure Information Protection client
• An updated viewer for protected files, including protected PDFs downloaded from SharePoint
• Manual (right-click) labeling and protection for non-Office files
• Bulk classification and labeling for data at rest using PowerShell

Users can now share protected documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) to a group of people at an organization (e.g. [email protected]) or to any specific person at a specified organization (e.g. [anyuser]@contoso.com). Read about the new collaboration features below.

• Group collaboration – this scenario is designed so that two organizations can collaborate effectively with each other without having to know exactly who is in the group. Simply by being a member of the group, permissions are provided to users. This requires that the group is in Azure AD (either through Azure AD Connect or a native cloud group).
• Company collaboration – this new feature enables content to be protected to all users within a specified organization, for example any user who works at Contoso. This is particularly useful in B2B scenarios like supply chains and M&A activitie.

Learn more about these features here.