Mandatory Unified Sensitivity Labels ( Except for Outlook )

Question

Mandatory Unified Sensitivity Labels ( Except for Outlook )

Jason Sewell 1

We are in the process of migrating from legacy AIP Labels to the new Unified Labels for data classification in Office365. In the past, users were required to label all new documents by AIP policy setting. However, we did not require users to label every email by taking advantage of the "DisableMandatoryInOutlook" advanced label policy.

As we migrate to Unified Labels and set the policy to enforce mandatory labels, we see that users are required to label every email, which is undesirable in our organization. It's not a surprise that Unified Labels are ignoring the DisableMandatoryInOutlook advanced AIP label policy, but we would like to know if there is an equivalent means in Unified Labels to not require users to label every email but still require them to label documents.

Answer 1

JamesTran-MSFT 27,506 Microsoft Employee

@Jason Sewell
Thank you for your post!

When it comes to "DisableMandatoryInOutlook", I found the available advanced client settings for classic AIP, and the equivalent for the unified labels. You should be able to Exempt Outlook messages from mandatory labeling by running:

Set-LabelPolicy -Identity Global -AdvancedSettings @{DisableMandatoryInOutlook="True"}

I've also added the 'office-exchange-server-mailflow' tag to this thread to see if our Outlook and Exchange mailflow community can look into this as well.

If you have any other questions, please let me know.
Thank you for your time and patience throughout this issue.

JamesTran-MSFT 27,506 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-12-07T18:01:09.923+00:00

I just wanted to check in and see if you had any other questions or if you were able to resolve this issue?

Please remember to "Accept Answer" if any answer/reply helped, so that others in the community facing similar issues can easily find the solution.
Jason H Sewell 6 Reputation points

2020-12-09T14:29:51.207+00:00

James, thank you for your assistance. We have observed that the DisableMandatoryInOutlook setting does not prevent users from being forced to label email in the Outlook web app (aka OWA). Are you aware of a work-around that prevents users from having to label mail created in OWA, but still require them to label newly-created documents in Word, Excel, Powerpoint?
AndyWoutersimec-7419 1 Reputation point

2021-03-15T10:39:05.373+00:00

Same question - we used the exception for outlook as described above. But this doesn not work for OWA (outlook web). Recently I am also getting in reports from endusers that even in their outlook client software this was again mandatory since 9/March/2021. This is only occurring on some of our endpoints.

Answer 2

Philipp Ebner 1

@Jason Sewell we have (had) the same problem.
what we did was, we set a default label (preferably a low priority one) and educated the users on changing the default, in case the file or email contains sensitive information.
why use a default label? well, if users create new content in sharepoint online or onedrive, they are not forced to set a label (yet). By setting a default label, we ensure, that at least every new file has a label (even if the user forgets to set one).

Marek Halfar 1 Reputation point

2021-03-19T12:19:59.123+00:00

We've used combination of both before moving to sensitivity labels, So default label ONLY in Outlook but mandatory everywhere. So now, with sensitivity labels and UL client, we are facing the same issue as @Jason Sewell as we do not have default label in the policy, but only in the advanced settings in different default label for Outlook....which is also ignored by OWA, the same as DisableMandatoryInOutlook.

Mandatory Unified Sensitivity Labels ( Except for Outlook )

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