Category Archives: Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview Information Protection Sensitivity Labels Not Showing – Sensitivity Button Greyed Out In Desktop Client

I recently was doing a PoC for Microsoft Purview Information Protection and when I started I realized I was no longer able to see sensitivity labels in the desktop version of Office. I had access to them months back without any issue. Of course I had already followed instructions on creating and publishing the labels to my user account. When I checked Office for Web, the button was available and functional. This issue was specific to desktop C2R Office clients. While troubleshooting I decided to turn off TLS decryption (handled by our Palo Alto firewalls) just to rule it out and to my surprise the button became available. When I looked at the firewall logs while decryption was on, I noticed some traffic failure hits for a sub-domain under protection.outlook.com. I looked through the documentation and eventually found this in the Azure Information Protection documentation:

Unified labeling client. To download labels and label policies, allow the following URL over HTTPS: *.protection.outlook.com

Sadly, the documentation says nothing about this needing to be excluded from any firewall/proxy inspection. The only mention of excluding hostnames from inspection was this (which we were already doing):

TLS client-to-service connections. Do not terminate any TLS client-to-service connections, for example to perform packet-level inspection, to the aadrm.com URL.

We actually did have a specific sub-domain under protection.outlook.com excluded from decryption, but that was not the one being used. I removed the specific sub-domain, added *.protection.outlook.com, and everything was working after that. I tried to log a case to force Microsoft to update their documentation, but I got the usual runaround and they have yet to update.