Communication compliance is a common concern for companies in highly regulated industries. When implementing solutions like Microsoft Teams for UCaaS and CCaaS, companies need to ensure their calls and conversation remains compliant to specific industry standards.
To assist with the development of successful communication compliance policies, and reduce risk among today’s companies, Microsoft introduced “Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance”. This is an “Insider Risk” service offered by Microsoft to help users detect, capture, and act on inappropriate messaging in an organisation.
By setting pre-defined policies, you can scan internal and external conversations within Teams for policy matches. Reviewers can then investigate Microsoft Teams' discussions and take actions to boost compliance. Specifically, Communication Compliance in Teams is intended to assist with identifying:
- Adult or inappropriate images
- Sensitive information sharing
- Offensive or harassing language
How to Leverage Communication Compliance in Teams
Purview Communication Compliance for Microsoft Teams allows businesses to set policies to address a range of compliance areas. For instance, you can establish:
- Corporate policies: Such as ensuring users comply with acceptable use policies and ethical standards in their business communications.
- Risk management strategies: By determining where users might be sensitive information, you can limit legal exposure and risk before they damage corporate reputations.
- Regulatory compliance: Your policies can prevent users from sharing information which might be deemed inappropriate according to compliance standards.
The service comes with intelligent customisable templates for policies, flexible remediation workflows to guide employees on the next steps when an issue is identified, and actionable insights.
For users of Microsoft Teams, the new “Purview Communication Compliance” feature is already tightly integrated into the app. You can access this service if you have the correct Microsoft 365 Office 365 subscription. Some plans will require the Insider Risk Management add-on.
Setting Compliance Permissions
The first step in leveraging communication compliance standards in Microsoft Teams is planning and creating pre-defined custom policies. You’ll need to begin by enabling permissions for communication compliance. You’ll need a Global Administrator or Compliance Administrator role in Microsoft Teams to enable the Purview compliance portal. From there, you can assign users to different “communication compliance” or “communication compliance admin” roles.
The standard communication compliance user role establishes a user as an individual be tracked for compliance issues. Administrators can create, read, and update communication compliance policies and settings. There’s also an “Analyst” role for reviewing policies, an “investigator” role for escalating issues, and a “viewer” option for users who can manage communication reports.
You can sign into the “permissions” section of the compliance portal with Teams to assign each user to specific groups. Compliance policies can be configured either at a user level or a Teams level. The Teams level configuration will apply your policies to everyone in a Teams channel.
After you’ve configured your permissions, you can create your compliance policies.
Notably, for beginners investing in communication compliance standards for the first time, Microsoft has a “recommended actions” section on the “Policies” page. This provides insights into sensitive information types you might need to address with each policy.
Creating Communication Compliance Policies
Creating your policies involves signing into the Microsoft Purview compliance portal as an administrator, and selecting the “Policies” tab. Here, you can select “Create policy” to configure a new policy from scratch, or use a template.
