Get started with sensitivity labels

Microsoft 365 licensing guidance for security & compliance.

For information about what sensitivity labels are and how they can help you protect your organization's data, see Learn about sensitivity labels.

When you're ready to start protecting your organization's data by using sensitivity labels:

1. Create the labels. Create and name your sensitivity labels according to your organization's classification taxonomy for different sensitivity levels of content. Use common names or terms that make sense to your users. If you don't already have an established taxonomy, consider starting with label names such as Personal, Public, General, Confidential, and Highly Confidential. You can then use sublabels to group similar labels by category.

   For each label, specify a tooltip to help users select the appropriate label and consider including specific examples. However, don't make the tooltip so long that users won't read it, and be aware that some apps might truncate long tooltips.

   Note

   For some recommended examples, see the label names and descriptions for the default sensitivity labels. For more guidance about defining a classification taxonomy, see Data classification & sensitivity label taxonomy.

   Always test and tailor your sensitivity label names and tooltips with the people who need to apply them.

2. Define what each label can do. Configure the protection settings you want associated with each label. For example, you might want lower sensitivity content (such as a "General" label) to have just a header or footer applied, while higher sensitivity content (such as a "Confidential" label) should have a watermark and encryption.

3. Publish the labels. After your sensitivity labels are configured, publish them by using a label policy. Decide which users and groups should have the labels and what policy settings to use. A single label is reusable—you define it once, and then you can include it in several label policies assigned to different users. So for example, you could pilot your sensitivity labels by assigning a label policy to just a few users. Then when you're ready to roll out the labels across your organization, you can create a new label policy for your labels and this time, specify all users.

The basic flow for deploying and applying sensitivity labels:

Subscription and licensing requirements for sensitivity labels

A number of different subscriptions support sensitivity labels and the licensing requirements for users depend on the features you use. Admins also need a license to manage sensitivity labels.

To see the options for licensing your users to benefit from Microsoft Purview features, see the Microsoft 365 licensing guidance for security & compliance. For sensitivity labels, see the Microsoft Purview Information Protection: Sensitivity labeling section and related PDF download for feature-level licensing requirements.

Permissions required to create and manage sensitivity labels

Members of your compliance team who will create sensitivity labels need permissions to the Microsoft Purview portal or the Microsoft Purview compliance portal.

To access the admin portal to create and manage sensitivity labels, you can use the following role groups:

• Information Protection
• Information Protection Admins
• Information Protection Analysts
• Information Protection Investigators
• Information Protection Readers

For an explanation of each one, and the roles that they contain, select a role group in the Microsoft Purview portal or the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, and then review the description in the flyout pane. Or, see Role groups in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and Microsoft Purview compliance.

Alternatively to using the default role groups, you can create a new role group and add the Sensitivity Label Administrator role to this group. For a read-only role, use Sensitivity Label Reader.

Another option is to add users to the Compliance Data Administrator, Compliance Administrator, or Security Administrator role group.

For configuration instructions, see the following guidance, depending on the portal you're using:

• Permissions in the Microsoft Purview portal
• Permissions in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal

These permissions are required only to create and configure sensitivity labels and their label policies. They are not required to apply the labels in apps or services. If additional permissions are needed for specific configurations that relate to sensitivity labels, those permissions will be listed in their respective documentation instructions.

Support for administrative units

Sensitivity labels support administrative units that have been configured in Microsoft Entra ID:

• You can assign administrative units to members of role groups that are used with Microsoft Purview Information Protection. Edit these role groups and select individual members, and then the Assign admin units option to select administrative units from Microsoft Entra ID. These administrators are now restricted to managing just the users in those administrative units.

• You can define the initial scope of sensitivity label policies and auto-labeling policies when you create or edit these policies. When you select administrative units, only the users in those administrative units will be eligible for the policy.

• Protection policies don't support administrative units.

The configuration of administrative units and the accuracy of their membership is a Microsoft Entra ID dependency. Although the main purpose of administrative units is to ensure the security best practice of least privileges, using administrative units for your labeling policies can simplify their configuration and maintenance.

For example, your organization has configured administrative units for specific countries, and you need to publish a new sensitivity label just to users in France and assign specific policy settings to these users:

1. You sign in to the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Your account is a member of the Information Protection Admins role group, and your account in that role group has been assigned administrative units for France, Germany, and Spain.

2. When you create the sensitivity label policy, you see just three administrative units and select the one for France, keeping the default of all users and groups.

   This configuration automatically scopes the policy to all users in France. You don't need to worry about which groups to select or manually select users. You also don't need to worry about changing the policy when there are new users in France, because this change is handled by the administrative unit in Microsoft Entra.

For more information about how Microsoft Purview supports administrative units, see Administrative units.

Deployment strategy for sensitivity labels

A successful strategy to deploy sensitivity labels for an organization is to create a working virtual team that identifies and manages the business and technical requirements, proof of concept testing, internal checkpoints and approvals, and final deployment for the production environment.

Using the table in the next section, we recommend identifying your top one or two scenarios that map to your most impactful business requirements. After these scenarios are deployed, return to the list to identify the next one or two priorities for deployment.

Common scenarios for sensitivity labels

All scenarios require you to Create and configure sensitivity labels and their policies.

End-user documentation for sensitivity labels

The most effective end-user documentation will be customized guidance and instructions you provide for the label names and configurations you choose. You can use the label policy setting Provide users with a link to a custom help page to specify an internal link for this documentation.

In Office apps, users can then easily access your customized help from the Sensitivity button, Learn More menu option.

From the Microsoft Purview Information Protection file labler in Windows File Explorer, users can access the same customized help from Help and Feedback > Tell Me More in the file labeler dialog box.

To help you provide your customized documentation, see the following page and downloads that you can use to help train your users: End User Training for Sensitivity Labels.

You can also use the following resources for basic instructions:

• Apply sensitivity labels to your files and email in Office

  • Known issues with sensitivity labels in Office

• Automatically apply or recommend sensitivity labels to your files and emails in Office

  • Known issues with automatically applying or recommending sensitivity labels

• Create protected PDFs from Office files

• Sensitivity labels for Teams meetings

• Apply sensitivity labels to your Outlook meetings.

• Label and protect files in File Explorer in Windows

If your sensitivity labels apply encryption for PDF documents, these documents can be opened with Microsoft Edge on Windows or Mac. For more information, see View protected PDFs using Microsoft Edge on Windows or Mac.