Exchange Online (M365) applies DRM to MS Office attachments
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We regularly email xlsx files to people outside our company.
On Monday one of my users received a note back from their counterpart telling them that they couldn't open the attachment.
After digging into it - MS is now applying Digital Rights Management (DRM) to attachments where it can.
Even worse - the external users so far in testing can't open the file unless they have an account in our M365 tenant.
It seems that MS has been rolling this change out for years - I've found posts about this in reddit from 5 years ago, and more recent posts about all the DRM changes they have been making lately.
The current listed solution is to disable encrypting the attachments tenant wide with this powershell command
Connect-ExchangeOnline Set-IRMConfiguration -DecryptAttachmentForEncryptOnly $true
I'm in the process of testing it.
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@Dashrender that is nuts. Let us know how the testing goes, I don't want to get bitten by this nonsense.
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So summary: MS is disabling the use of MS365 for communications with external customers. It's an internal use only system now?
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I ASSUME that their answer is that no one should be emailing attachments like that and they should be sending links to the hosted files instead?
I can't remember the last time that we had to email someone an attachment of an office document, just saying that sounds like a legacy process. Who needs to do that in the modern world?