In an ongoing commitment to protect customer information, Office is expanding encryption across all its services. Earlier this month, Office 365 Message Encryption was introduced as a new service that allows you to send encrypted mail to anyone. And now, Office has announced S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) capability to Office 365 and Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1.
As the Office 365 blog explains, S/MIME differs from Office 365 Message Encryption in that it is a standard for public key encryption and digital signing of MIME data. It requires a certificate and publishing infrastructure often used in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) scenarios. It’s also a requirement for certain government business cases. S/MIME allows a user to encrypt and digitally sign an email. It provides cryptographic security services such as authentication and message integrity. It also helps enhance privacy and data security (using encryption) for electronic messaging.
With this release, customers will have S/MIME support across Outlook, Outlook Web App (OWA) and Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) clients. S/MIME for Outlook and EAS is already available on Exchange Online; on OWA its roll out is now underway and expected to be completed by early April.
Head over to the Office 365 blog to get all the details on S/MIME encryption in Office 365.
You might also be interested in:
- Los Angeles Unified School District chooses Office 365 for faculty and staff
- Get 100 GB of OneDrive storage through new Bing Rewards special offer
- Support for Windows XP and Office 2003 ends April 8, 2014 — what’s next?
Athima Chansanchai
Microsoft News Center Staff