Monday, 3 April 2017

Utilizing Sway instead of Office for document creation and sharing

I had an interesting conversation with a customer last week. They were interested in making use of the benefits of Sway, but wanted to understand how they can protect content when using this service. Sway doesn't support Rights Management integration, so if you're looking at protecting documents and want to control who has access to them, provide instant revocation or indeed see where you're documents are being opened and by who (including who has tried to access them), then Sway isn't for you.


You can only password protect your content. You can limit the share function to users within your Organisation or for all, see the Share functionality below:






If you don't want to be able to provide external sharing, then as a Global Admin you can disable this function in the Office 365 Admin Center. Including limiting where content is ingested from.






Interestingly, Sway doesn't currently support encryption at rest like the traditional core workloads of Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online which provide Bitlocker or file level encryption at rest services. It's only available from North American datacenters too - so be aware of where your data is being held.



If you need to utilize Rights Management or Information Protection capabilities, then I would suggest at this time continuing to utilize the Office suite with Azure RMS/AIP - especially if you need to share with external third parties. By all means give your employees access to Sway, but you may want to ensure external sharing is disabled for now.



Oliver Moazzezi – Office Servers and Services MVP
Twitter: @Olivermoazzezi










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