Configuring IRM for SharePoint Online Libraries and Lists

Information Rights Management(IRM) Polices protects sensitive content from unauthorized users. By Applying IRM to document you can prevent users from printing or copying a file. Office 365 SharePoint Online provides support for IRM through Active Directory Rights Management (Microsoft Azure AD RM) which is included in E3 and E4 plans.

 In Office 365 SharePoint online IRM is applied at the library or list level. An organization’s office 365 admin should first activate the Rights Management Service for the organization from the Office 365 admin center before IRM can be applied to SharePoint library or list. The process of activating the rights management service is detailed Activating rights management

After activating rights management service, IRM has to be turned on from SharePoint Admin Center by following the below steps

1. Sign in to Office 365 as admin and to SharePoint Admin Center and then choose settings from options in the left.
2. On the settings page scroll down to Information Rights Management section, and choose Use the IRM service specified in your configuration option, and click Refresh IRM Settings button.

Once IRM has been turned on site owners will be able to apply IRM policies to document libraries and lists in the site by following the below steps

1. Go to the settings page of the library for which the IRM policy has to be applied and click Information Rights Management under Permissions and Management section.
2. On the Information Rights Management Settings page, select the Restrict permission to documents in this library on download check box for applying permission to documents.
3. Enter a  name for the policy in In the Create a permission policy title input box and provide a description in Add a permission policy description input box.
4. Click Show Options to expand IRM Library settings and select the restrictions that has to be applied for documents in library and click OK button.

For example if you want to disallow users from uploading files that do not support IRM then select Do not allow users to upload documents that do not support IRM check box and click OK. When users try to upload a file that do not support IRM such as an image  to the library, they would be prevented from uploading the file and a message indicating unsupported file type will be shown.