Enable co-authoring of Protected Documents
Currently, documents that are labelled can be co-authored in Office, but any document that is encrypted can only be opened by one person at a time. This prevents most of the business scenarios folks use today with two three or more folks editing a document at the same time. Instead - it forces businesses to email copies of a document around after setting AIP policies to allow folks to all edit it. A huge blocker for most of our customers.

Web based clients co-authoring is now availble in GA.
We are working to support rich clients co-authoring with protected documents in the future.
14 comments
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Anonymous commented
Co-authoring and Autosave could at least be split so that a single User doesn't loose Autosave if the file is password protected ... that shouldn't be a huge feature development.
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Ken Layton commented
Unfortunately, Web based client co-authoring does not work for documents in SharePoint IRM enabled libraries. When will this issue be addressed?
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Anonymous commented
Yeah, this is a big problem. Providing co-authoring of encrypted documents in the browser-based apps is only a first step - but this MUST be followed up SOON with desktop/mobile app support for encrypted document co-authoring. At the moment, Microsoft is forcing companies to choose between security and collaboration--this shouldn't be a choice in an IT world that must be security-focused from the get-go.
Also I think Microsoft should realize that most people would like to use Onedrive in the same way that we have all gotten used to using Dropbox. As a file-system sync tool. Directly downloading and uploading documents from/to Sharepoint website is absurdly antiquated and not a good user experience at all.
Thus we need a seamless collaboration experience that is native to the operating system (oh yeah Microsoft you own that too!) but that also does not sacrifice on security.
But maybe the Onedrive sync process and speed will need to be significantly improved to support encrypted document co-authoring? Fluid Framework?
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Anonymous commented
Maybe they added decryption functionality to SharePoint @jm2017.
And is this available for Azure Information Protection or Unified Labeling? Or both?
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jm2017 commented
"Web based clients co-authoring is now availble in GA"
I wonder how co-authoring in Office Online can work for AIP encrypted files as they cannot be displayed in the browser at all if they are encrypted?
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Craig Richard commented
Does this only apply to someone changing/setting a label on a file that's being co-authored? What's the risk/implication here?
When you enable this preview, users who apply a label to a file by using the Office desktop or mobile apps might be unable to save other changes they make to the file. Instead, the app prompts users to Save As or Discard local changes. To avoid losing work, do one of these actions:
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Anonymous commented
Hoping AIP and co-authoring in the web Excel and Word are supported soon!
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Joe Alonge commented
With the way it sits right now AIP takes sharepoint back to a non-collaborative platform. You basically have to make the decision between collaboration or security. With all the regulations these days we need this feature to work correctly.
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Josh Velazquez commented
has there been a work around or fix for co-authoring encrypted documents?
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Asgeir Husum commented
Any news on this feature?
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Bocko commented
We are just testing both AIP and co-authoring. I was very disappointed to learn that they don't work together.
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Marco Farina commented
It will be a great features!!!
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Mat commented
I agree, co-authoring is widely used in my organisation. This means content would have to stay unprotected through the entire draft/review process and only the final version could be protected.
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Reed Wiedower commented
I've had various people say "of course you can edit it with multiple people - just configure them and email them the document" which misses the huge benefit organizations see when they move to OneDrive for Business and SPO and Office 365 Groups. These folks, once addicted to co-authoring, never want to go back to the old days of "your file is locked" which unfortunately is the default AIP experience right now.