You may or may not have noticed that on the 1st September Microsoft announced new security features for Office 365 Education users however these weren’t new as they have been in the platform for a few years.
Education licenses have been aligned more to the enterprises licenses with E1 Student/Faculty matching E1 Enterprise and as new features have been added to E1 they are assigned to both tenant types. The new security features announced in this post are based around some of the features that are part of E3 Enterprise.
With any of my customers I haven’t seen any use of E3 as almost all have been happy to use the free licenses and pleased that they can get Office 365 Pro Plus as part of their Microsoft licensing but Microsoft have mixed up the features and given more to education customers for free which were in E3.
These are based more around security and discovery of files better known as E-Discovery, Rights Management Services and Data Loss Prevention have also been added but what are these.
I always describe E-Discovery as a search service if you need to find data across your whole tenant for a disciplinary hearing and you need to find everything that mentions certain words. An example I use is if a gang has started in a school and they have a name and you need to find all the emails, files and data which uses the gang name. Having searched the name, the E-Discovery tool will give you a ZIP file to download all that content.
RMS is a great way of keeping data secure by only allowing users to see the data they should. Now you might be thinking ‘well SharePoint permissions does that for me’ but this takes it to the next level. With RMS/DLP you can prevent sensitive data from being printed, secure documents with encryption if it starts to hold student data and also prevent files from being print screened and then copied into other files. Rights ensures only the right people can view the content and alongside DLP prevents them from doing certain things with it.