Microsoft has made its new “Secure documents“Feature generally available to all Office 365 customers, the company announced last night.
The new Secure Documents feature, which launched in a private preview in February 2020, expands “Protected View”, a default security feature in Office 365 apps.
Protected View works by opening suspicious files in a “read-only” mode where all user editing functions and dynamic content execution are blocked by default.
Protected View is activated for all files that have originated from outside an organization, such as files opened from an Internet location, files received as an email attachment (from domains that a system administrator has not marked such as safe) or files opened from an insecure storage location (such as the Temp folder).
However, sometimes users have to edit these files to do their job, and they have to leave the Protected View sandbox to do it.
This is where Safe Documents comes in.
Microsoft says that when users choose to leave Protected View mode, if Secure Documents is enabled, it will send the file to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (the commercial version of Microsoft Defender) and scan it before allowing the user to exit Protected View and edit the file.
As the file is scanned, Protected View remains active, but if the file is deemed safe, the classic “Enable Editing” button appears, allowing users to completely exit Protected View and enter normal editing mode. Office.
If the file is found to be malicious or contains malicious or suspicious features, the file is blocked from leaving Protected View and an alert is sent to the company’s Office 365 dashboard.
Microsoft says that as of this week, Safe Documents is now available to Office 365 customers with an E5 license, the company’s highest and most expensive level of Office 365.
Safe Documents is disabled by default, so administrators will need to manually enable it from their Office 365 dashboards.
Once enabled, the feature is activated for all users in an organization. Support for enabling the feature for Office 365 user groups will be added in a future update, Microsoft said on Twitter on Tuesday.
More information about Secure Documents is available on the official Microsoft support page.
