Protecting your most valuable content

It’s never been easier to share your information and collaborate — and likewise, it has never been riskier, costlier, and more embarrassing to experience a…

Mike Safar profile picture

Mike Safar

March 2, 20213 minutes read

It’s never been easier to share your information and collaborate — and likewise, it has never been riskier, costlier, and more embarrassing to experience a data leak. These two competing realities create a real dilemma for IT: How do you maintain productivity and foster collaboration among a widely dispersed workforce while keeping control of your most valuable and sensitive content?

Data leaks can be extremely damaging to an organization’s reputation and bottom line. Every week, news reports detail multiple, costly document leaks that expose private and proprietary information, events that the organization could conceivably prevent by protecting the content with policy-driven permissions and strong data encryption. These are risks that can be substantially mitigated by purposely driving security controls into how you create and govern your content.

Microsoft’s answer to this dilemma is Azure Information Protection (AIP). Deeply integrated with Office 365 apps, AIP controls what content users can see and how they can use and share it with anyone inside — or outside — the organization. And now, OpenText™ Extended ECM broadens its best-in-class integration with Office 365 to elegantly protect content transparently to the user.


AIP is built into all Office 365 applications to enforce strict policy controls and encrypt digital content according to pre-built policies managed by the organization. Using Microsoft Unified Labeling, users can determine what policy to apply to the content. Information governance practitioners can also configure Office to suggest a policy based on the cues in the content, such as ithe presence of sensitive or proprietary data. The document is subsequently encrypted to ensure that those controls are strictly enforced, including when being edited by Microsoft Office applications and preventing attempts to view the content if it leaks to the wrong individuals. AIP also serves as an infrastructure to manage real-time access to the content, current policy, and expiration.

Extended ECM detects AIP-protected content and elegantly records the content and policy controls. Whenever a user opens or downloads the document, Extended ECM automatically applies the appropriate policy and encryption to the document, ensuring that it remains fully protected. And those with appropriate permissions to the workspace and document can quickly find these documents through full-text search. If a document is sent via email or downloaded to a laptop, policy controls are enforced by AIP even if the content is circulating outside of Extended ECM or even the organization’s network.

This integration with Microsoft Azure Information Protection is part of OpenText’s ongoing core mission to provide the very best platform for managing your content throughout its full lifecycle and taking care to enhance your organization’s productivity and security.

This new capability to protect your most sensitive and valuable information assets is part of OpenText Extended ECM. Learn more about OpenText™ Extended ECM for Microsoft® Office 365™.

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Mike Safar avatar image

Mike Safar

Mike Safar leads product marketing for OpenText information governance products and serves as a subject matter expert on information governance solutions and best practices. Mike’s previous experience has been in product management and marketing of leading information governance products for over 25 years, starting with integrated document management, records systems, and most recently intelligent content analytics solutions. His past experience includes positions at Interwoven, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and PC DOCS Group.

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