A business acquaintance from another company sends you a document that is encrypted by Azure Information Protection (AIP). You are unable to open the document because the user account cannot be authenticated by the company’s Azure Active Directory. You need to access the document. What should you do?

The problem described is that the recipient's user account cannot be authenticated by the sender's Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), which is a prerequisite for decrypting content protected by Azure Information Protection (AIP). "RMS for individuals" is a free, self-service subscription from Microsoft designed specifically for this situation. It allows a user, whose organization does not have Azure AD, to create an identity in Azure AD using their business email address. This new identity can then be authenticated, allowing the user to open and consume content that has been protected by the Azure Rights Management (RMS) service from another company.

B. Implementing Information Rights Management (IRM) in an Office application only enables the client-side feature; it does not solve the backend authentication failure with Azure AD.
C. Upgrading to a full AIP plan is an organizational-level action and is not necessary for an individual to simply consume a protected document sent from an external party.

1. Microsoft Documentation

"RMS for individuals and Azure Information Protection": "RMS for individuals is a free self-service subscription for users in an organization that does not have a Microsoft 365 or Azure AD subscription

and who need to open files that are protected by Azure Rights Management... If these users cannot be authenticated by Azure AD

they cannot open the protected content. The free RMS for individuals subscription solves this problem."

Source: Microsoft Learn

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/information-protection/rms-for-individuals

Section: "RMS for individuals and Azure Information Protection".

2. Microsoft Documentation

"Azure Information Protection frequently asked questions": In response to the question "Can I share protected documents with people outside my company?"

the documentation states: "Yes... If the recipient's email account isn't in Azure AD

they can sign up for RMS for individuals."

Source: Microsoft Learn

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/information-protection/faq

Section: "Sharing protected documents".