Unified Labeling Will Improve Governance Efforts

[This report has been updated: See “Unified Labeling Will Improve Governance Efforts“]

• Hosted services, such as Azure Information Protection and Office 365, offer content labeling technologies.
• To minimize duplicate services, Microsoft is standardizing label creation and management across services.
• The centralizing of label management is just beginning, and work is still required to ensure all technologies can use unified labeling.

To help customers ensure that the content labels used by multiple Office 365 services and Azure Information Protection (AIP) are consistent, Microsoft is centralizing content label classification management in Office 365, away from AIP using a separate set of labels. Modifying all Microsoft compliance tools, services, and clients to take advantage of unified labeling is still a work in progress, and older AIP client software will need to be replaced with a new version.

Inefficiency of Multiple Label Technologies

Multiple Microsoft technologies can categorize (label) documents and e-mail based on content, which can then be used to determine how the content should be protected. Labeling technologies use expression-based rules to find matching content, and act on it.