Introducing Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MPIP) in Adobe Acrobat

PDF is the world’s most popular business document format. Organizations demand best-in-class security, compliance, and information protection to ensure only critical stakeholders can view, manage, and approve high-value business documents such as PDFs. With the increasing need for security for digital assets, we see Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MPIP) in Adobe Acrobat as fundamental and game-changing for organizations. Information Protection already classifies and protects Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. This integration brings the same classification, labeling and protection already available in Office file formats to PDFs via Acrobat.

Earlier in the year, at Microsoft Build, Adobe announced Information Protection labeling in Acrobat as a new capability for end users.

Adobe Acrobat and Reader apps started supporting consistent viewing of PDFs protected by Microsoft Purview Information Protection in 2018. For organizations standardizing on MPIP, we have now launched the native capability to apply and edit Information Protection sensitivity labels and policies to their PDFs within the desktop version of Acrobat. This latest and comprehensive MPIP labeling experience leverages the most recent MPIP SDK version. We have also considered finer nuances such as label descriptions, embedded content markings, justification logic, etc. to ensure a more intuitive experience for our customers.

In addition to manual pre-defined labels, Acrobat also supports advanced use cases of default labeling, mandatory labeling, and user-defined permissions for bespoke access.

We partnered closely with many customers including an independent agency of the US government that plans on leveraging sensitivity labels to protect confidential information in financial forms shared as PDFs. Additionally, a major sports apparel manufacturer requires assigning bespoke permissions to users on a varied set of important and sensitive PDF documents. We also spoke to a leading global investment management company where relationship managers want to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and highly confidential client data in documents such as client reports and account statements. They also expressed advanced labeling needs to implement default and mandatory labeling for PDFs.

We are excited to see customers using this native integration of Information Protection labelling in Adobe Acrobat for many purposes. It is well suited for regulated industries such as government sector, healthcare, and financial services, and is especially valuable in departments such as legal, finance, and procurement.

We are currently launching the feature on the desktop app and have plans to support MPIP use cases for PDFs (viewing, labeling, persisting protection during export workflows) for mobile and web surfaces in the future.

Adobe has been named the Security ISV of the Year for 2023 by Microsoft. Microsoft
announced the 2023 Microsoft Security Excellence Awards winners at the annual RSA conference in San Francisco. PDFs are the secure document format and often contain sensitive information. Adobe is committed to providing data protection capabilities to fully support the PDF file format, and is working to achieve this across multiple products, services, and platforms. This award recognizes the innovation and investment Adobe has made in ensuring security & compliance as illustrated by the support for Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels in Acrobat.

Learn more about how Adobe and Microsoft are transforming the future of work here.

We would like to thank Jatin Sethi, product manager, for his contributions to this blog post.