Crewe, February 1st, 2012 – The new Enhanced Labelling Feature Pack for Boldon James Classifier offers a set of new marking possibilities, together with even greater usability and consistency in labelling. Furthermore, the latest v3.3 release of Email and Office Classifier provides all customers with a range of additional features to benefit users and provide new policy and interoperability choices.
This new feature pack is available as a chargeable option to new and existing customers of Email and Office Classifier, with the v3.3 release being a prerequisite.
Users now have convenient access to the labels they use most often or find most useful. The administrator can elect to add a Favourites feature to the end-user interface. This allows the user to record the labels they use as personal ‟favourites‟. The same user interface extension also offers the ability for the user to select from their most recently-used label values. The extension applies both to the ribbon group interface and the label chooser dialogue.
The markings that can be applied to emails and documents can now include a richer collection of information relating to the user and their operating environment. Administrators can include dynamic placeholders such as a date, user name or other user-related or session variables within any marking format. Previously the only variables that could be added to a marking were based on the label values e.g. Classification, etc.
End users can now be provided with assistance in selecting appropriate label values, simplifying choices and ensuring validity of the selected combination of values. To achieve this, the administrator creates associations between different selectors and their values to constrain the user’s choice of labels and assist the user in selecting appropriate label values. Where enabled, the feature allows the selective display of each labelling selector within the ribbon group. For example – where the policy has the two label selectors „Classification‟ and „Project‟, then the configuration could present the „Project‟ selector only where a Classification value other than PUBLIC has been selected.
In addition, the values presented by a selector can be made dependent on the choice from a preceding selector. For example – the Project selector value of RESTRUCTURING may only be presented where a Classification value of HIGHLY-CONFIDENTIAL has been selected.
New features in Classifier v3.3
The following new features are available to all customers of the standard Email and Office Classifier product as part of the v3.3 release.
Folder View Labelling: Emails received that may not have a label can now be manually labelled by the recipient, for example where an email originates externally. Users can simply label items within their Outlook inbox or via the “read item” inspector. The administrator can enable this feature and also choose whether items with an existing label can be modified or if only non-labelled items can be marked in this manner. As well as modifying the item’s label, all metadata rules are also applied.
Outlook Category Rule: This facility allows a new rule to be configured that automatically applies an Outlook “category” to an email upon Send or during the Folder View labelling activity. This feature is of particular relevance where an email archiving solution may be using the category flags to indicate an archiving action.
It should be noted that category markings are not transmitted with an email and are local flags applied to stored messages.
Portion Marking Consistency: Email and Office Classifier now support a streamlined, consistent approach to the selection and application of portion marks across the application plug-ins. Textual portion marks can be applied anywhere within the body of an email or document. Checks can be made at the time of insertion to ensure that the portion mark is not inconsistent with that of the email or document i.e. a “high watermark” check.
Default Label Check Rule: Where a policy is configured to use a default label, there may be a concern that users will use the default without consideration. A new policy rule has been introduced so that if the user has not modified the label from the default, then a warning can be provided on the initial sending of an email, or the first save of a document. This allows an administrator to offer users the convenience of providing a default label but with a double check to ensure that users are aware that the default label is being applied.
The rule does not apply to email replies and forwards.
Generic Warning Rule: A generic policy rule without conditions has been introduced to provide for a warning message to be generated based solely upon the user’s choice of label selector values. Examples of the use of this rule might be to warn users when selecting the highest level of classification that this label should only be used for specific purposes, or that items with the selected label may be subject to quarantine and review by other security technologies.
Although this rule is likely to be most commonly used to provide a warning to users, the option also exists to either block the user’s action or simply audit the event.
Default Label for Office Templates: Document templates (e.g. Test_Report.dotx) can now be assigned a default label specific to the template. This template label is used as the default for any documents created from that template rather than using any default label that may be assigned by the policy.
New Policy Templates: To assist in the creation of new policy configurations, two new policy configuration templates have been provided. One is for use with the US Federal CUI (Controlled Unclassified Information) programme, the other is for interoperation of email classification with Blackberry mobile devices.
Clearance Checking Using the From Field: Clearance checking can now be configured to include the From field within clearance checks, rather than using the primary mailbox owner. Typically, this is useful for multimailbox environments, or when sending using the identity of an external email account.