Virtru Academy Live: Virtru O365 for End Users

Steven Margolies: Thank you all for your patience. I think we can now get started. Today's session is Virtru for Microsoft Outlook 365 essential user training. Let's dive in. 

My name is Steven Margolies. I am the Senior Director of Customer Support here at Virtru, and I am going to walk you through today's session. We are going to go over what Virtru is, why it is important, how to use the add-in, how to get support, and then at the end, we will have time for questions and answers. 

First, what is Virtru? We are an email and file encryption solution that gives users full control over their data. We help organizations by playing a key role in keeping data secure and staying compliant with major privacy regulations, think HIPAA, FERPA, CJIS, and more. When you use Virtru to encrypt your files, it ensures that you are staying compliant with a number of regulations. Obviously, failure to adhere can lead to fines. It can help limit the risk of a data breach with an additional level of security to help maintain control over your data and ensure only authorized recipients are accessing that content. We also help you maintain trust. If you do have a breach or some sort of compliance violation, that can undermine trust with your customers and lead to both reputational and economic fallout.

When should you use Virtru? These are just some examples. If you want direct guidance for your organization and your team, please talk to your internal administrators. But here are some examples of how we see organizations using Virtru. I mentioned HIPAA before, so health services when you are dealing with personally identifiable information or protected health information. Maybe you are dealing with case reports, criminal justice information, confidential legal information, or security data. Potentially you are talking with family where you might have HIPAA, PII, PHI, or financial data. If you are in HR, there might be some onboarding paperwork and anything else that might be private. Again, these are examples. They are common use cases for our customers, but for guidance, make sure to talk to your internal administrators.

Now for the bulk of our presentation, which is how to use Virtru. I will walk you through a number of things. We will go through the installation process, the activation process, sending secure content and additional security settings, reading secure emails, search, the recipient experience, and additional tips and tricks.

The first thing we are going to go over today is installation. The easiest way to find our install is to go to our install page or our Help Center. This is a longer URL, but we have virtru.com/install which will redirect here. Or if you go to our Help Center, support.virtru.com, and you go to the user section, come down to the 365 add-in section, you can see there is the getting started section with an install page. If you are on this install page from our main website, when you click on the install button for the add-in, it will also bring you to the Help Center to this page.

For installation, if you are doing it on your own, I am going to walk through that. I will note, many administrators will actually end up pushing this out to end users, so you might see Virtru already installed. But just in case you need to install it yourself, these are the steps. You will actually open this link in your browser. It is going to look like a bunch of code. As the instructions say, you will right-click in here and click save as. Make sure to leave it as an XML.

Then you are going to use one of these links to get to what we call the sideload menu in your Outlook Webmail. You click this link. It is going to go to your Webmail. You have to sign in. In a few moments, you will actually get a pop-up for the sideload menu. From here, you go to my add-ins, go to the bottom, and there is a custom add-in section. Add custom add-in, add from file, and then find that file that we saved before and open it. Click install, and you will see Virtru is now listed here. Sometimes it takes a few moments to appear.

I click on new email. We will see if it is already here now. Give a quick refresh to my browser. New email. You can see Virtru appears up here. If Virtru didn't open automatically, again, it is in the add-in section. If you don't see it listed here, click on apps and it should be in that nested subfolder. You click on Virtru, and it will give you this add-in menu. You have a couple of options to activate. The easiest one is typically just using your provider login. Put in your username and password with Microsoft. Once you see the toggle, you are activated.

How do you send a secure email? Once you open a new draft and you have Virtru open, you want to encrypt your message. You can toggle Virtru on. Once you do that, you will see some additional security settings that you can apply to your message. Disable forwarding means that if the recipient tries to send this message to somebody else, that new party will not be able to actually decrypt the content. Expiration date means that after a certain number of days, months, or years, whatever you set it to, the recipients would lose access to the content.

We also have some attachment options. Watermarking, if it is an applicable file type, will require that the user view the content in the Virtru Secure Reader, which I will show you later, while also displaying their email address across the face of the document in case they were to screenshot it. Persistent protection also requires that users view content only in the Virtru Secure Reader, so they always have to activate in order to view the content. For both of these, there are some limitations on supported file types, which we have documentation for online. But again, if applied, users will have to view that content in the Secure Reader and will not be able to view a local copy.

For this one, I am going to get an email together. Let's put a file in here, set my recipient, and I will send the file. You will briefly see Virtru is working your request, and you will see a pop-up while we are processing the message, and then the message has been delivered.

I also want to note there are occasions where you might see Virtru pop up and automatically encrypt content or give you a warning. If you give me a moment, I will show you one of those as well. We will do a draft in this example. We are going to leave Virtru off. In this organization, we have a rule to capture Social Security numbers. I will put in something in the format of a Social Security number. When I hit send, you will again see Virtru is processing, and then it actually grabbed and wrapped it. You can see that briefly. We saw that template.

We also have warnings. Again, I am going to have Virtru off in this case. In my organization, we have a rule for this keyword. When I hit send, we are processing. Then there is actually a pop-up that says, hey, you may want to consider encrypting this based on the content. On this one, I didn't actually include anything, so I am just going to send it in the clear.

Let's talk about reading messages. Whether it is one you sent or one you received, you will actually read your content the same way. If we go to the sent folder and we go to, let's go with the recipe one. When you first open that message, you are going to see a Virtru template that looks like this. It might have the Virtru logo, or it might have your own company logo. We will look at some examples in a moment of what that might look like. Either way, you will see this unlock message template. You do not need to click this link.

Instead, you will find the Virtru button. It might be at the top here. It might be in the apps menu. Sometimes it is found in here. Clicking here will open Virtru, and this is where the actual content is. You will see the attachment I had and the text. As the sender, for anything I sent, I also have the ability to manage that message. Let's say I forgot to put an expiration date on there. I can change that. Let's go with one month. I can update that, and I want to watermark my content. If it is something that you sent, you can actually manage that content.

You can see the expiration date and watermarking have been applied, and as the sender, I still have access here. You can also just completely revoke the message. We know that this panel is a little small, so if you need a little bit more space to read your message, we have a little button to pop that out. You can expand that window, and it gives you a little bit more space. Also, within the add-in menu, we have a print option. We will talk about some of these other options in a moment, but we have a print option here.

Let's say you are also looking for something that you may have sent before. We do have a search functionality. If you are in Virtru, and for those of you that might be using Virtru a lot, you can pin Virtru so that it is always open when drafting and reading messages. Let's say you want to search for something, and you want to find something about chicken wings. Let's just put chicken in here. We will do a search. What it actually does is it puts a search string into your clipboard.

Here is the plain text, and then here are the search tokens for the word chicken. I will note these tokens are unique per organization, so you can only search content that has been sent by you or your colleagues within your team. You will not be able to do an encrypted search for content from other Virtru organizations. The tokens that I am seeing here are only for my account and my organization, virtru-test.biz. If I run that search, you can see it brought up some options, some old test messages, and then the one that I sent today.

Let's jump over and look at the recipient experience. First, I am going to show you our default template. This is what an unbranded message looks like. It has the Virtru logo, Virtru colors, and here is the one I sent today. If your organization has set this up, you might have some custom colors, a custom logo, and custom text. For the recipient, most of them will not have Virtru, at least if they are external to your organization. They will click unlock message.

That will route them to the Secure Reader. They will select their email address or enter it. If there are many email addresses on the recipient list, we are not going to display them all. Or maybe if someone is BCC'd, we are also not going to display their email address here, so they can click use another. The sender's address is also not shown here. If for whatever reason you as a sender are accessing the Secure Reader, you will have to manually enter your email address.

We will click that one. If you are using Google or Microsoft, we do have options to log in with your provider. If not, you have a one-time verification email pathway. If the user uses that pathway, they can either use the code and enter it here, or if they are in the same browser and in the same session, they can open that link, which will bring them back into the Secure Reader and actually open that message.

Once they are in here, the recipient can then view the content. They will see any of the security settings. You can see the expiration date and watermarking on the file. Because it is watermarked, again, they can't download it. They can only view it. When you go to view that file, this is the email address that I am in the system with, this Gmail address, which is why it is across the face of the document. While the recipient is in here, they can reply. They can actually send a secure email back to you.

Both this Gmail user in the example and my Virtru account user will get a copy of that message. If I go in here, you can see I got a copy of that message. This is the Gmail mailbox. It goes in my inbox, showing from my Gmail account. If I jump over here and go to my inbox, this is the message that came through. It is delivered from a virtru.com address because it is sent through our portal, but the reply-to is set to whoever was in the Secure Reader.

Reading this message is the same as reading your sent message. You have to open Virtru. Again, you can pin that. It makes things a little easier if you are going to be reading a lot of secure content. You can see the content of that message right here. You do not need to click unlock message.

If you have Virtru open on a message that is not encrypted, such as this one, you will just see a message that it is not encrypted.

If you are having trouble with something, sometimes refreshing the page will help. I also want to note, when you are sending messages, while you see that Virtru is processing the email, you want to let that finish processing before you start clicking away. If you click into another message or another draft, the add-in tries to change context and it can interrupt the send. We suggest letting that process run through. If you have any questions about why the message automatically encrypted or why you got a warning, and you want to adjust those settings, you should talk to your internal administrators. They can definitely help you out and explain the configuration. That is the bulk of using the product here.

Before we jump into Q&A, I want to quickly cover how to get support. We have a self-serve option. If you go to our Help Center at support.virtru.com, we have a lot of different sections. The one aimed at you will be Virtru for Users. If you go to the 365 section, it will have guides on getting started as well as troubleshooting guides if needed.

If your questions are not answered in the portal, we do have an option to send in a ticket with the contact support button, where you can give us more details and someone from my team will be happy to assist.

Also, if you are having trouble, there are a couple of quick things you can try. You can refresh your user settings. Maybe your administrator changed something on the backend and something is out of sync. You can clear your add-in cache, which will force you to reactivate. If you are working with us on a case, we might ask you to enable debug logging, which gives us some advanced logging on the backend.

Here, we have the quick link to the Support Center. We also have a link to the Control Center, which is where you can manage some details about the messages you have sent. Most of you will not have an admin section unless you are an admin. You will have at least the personal section with a settings area where you can do things like defaults and introductions, and a My Data section where you can similarly manage the content that you have sent out.

Here is a message I sent earlier. The email itself is not here, but you can manage the security settings. For example, if you decide you don't want watermarking on, or the expiration date needs to be extended.

If anything else does come up and you have some questions, again, we have a Help Center. There is a lot of great content, and we also have a contact form where we can help you directly. Thank you all for joining today, and I hope you all have a great day.