There’s an effective end-user adoption setting for Azure Information Protection (AIP) in the Global Policy settings page in the Azure Portal. Although there are many configuration options and settings for AIP, you will find a small yet very important one for information workers at the bottom of the configuration screen… a custom URL.
Description: Provide a custom URL for the Azure Information Protection client “Tell me more” web page (optional; otherwise leave blank)
Why not point this URL to an AIP help page on your organization’s Data Protection Adoption Center? I mean… you likely already have a help page built anyway right? 😉
A Data Protection Adoption Center is a concept I’ve blogged about in the past. It’s a corporate SharePoint Communication site purpose-built to provide information worker education on all data protection features across Office 365 including, among other things, AIP.
The Data Protection Adoption Center can be a Featured link on your SharePoint app, linked to from your corporate intranet, and even shown to new-employees during their orientation week. The most important thing is to make it easy to find so when information workers have questions about protecting corporate data, they know where to go! Remember… data protection is only as good as the weakest link – we need to arm users with the knowledge to do the right thing when presented with the options.
Build AIP Help Pages
Start by building a series of modern pages in your Adoption Center. The purpose is to introduce the concept of AIP labels, why it’s important for information workers to safeguard corporate content and how labeling can help them do that. Dedicate one Hero web part tile on the Adoption Center homepage to link to it. In this site example, I’ve chosen to name the tile Label Protection. Remember, you don’t have to call it AIP to information workers. Instead, pick a name that will resonate with them:
Some of the things you might want to share on your Label Protection page(s):
- video to step users through applying/changing a label
- what does the new Protect icon do?
- what’s this new Information Protection bar?
- what Office products will show the Information Protection bar?
- what is the default label (if one is set)?
- what do each of the labels mean? Dedicate one page to each one
- what are the controls for each label? (encryption, do not forward, etc.)
- what are examples of the types of content for each label?
- How do you track documents you’ve shared externally now that they’re labeled?
Another great way of communicating what each label means and when to apply it is to leverage the label tooltips so end-users can hover over the label right within the Office client. These tooltips are configured in the Azure Portal for each label definition.
Wire it up!
Once the pages are built, set the custom URL in the AIP Global Policy settings in Azure to the main Label Protection page URL. Information workers will find the “Tell me more” link when they click on the Protect button on the toolbar in any of the Office clients (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) and select Help and Feedback.
A small window will open with the “Tell Me More” link:
This will display the Label Protection help page. (the same one linked to from the Adoption Center Hero tile above) and is one small way of ensuring information workers have help at their fingertips. Why not include a video right on the page for a quick way to show them how to apply labels and what they mean?
It’s a simple yet effective setting. The best kind.
Thanks for reading.
-JCK