Compliance has always been a critical concern for businesses around the world. Whether you’re trying to ensure compliance with a series of policies specific to your company or you need to follow regulations unique to your industry, it’s crucial to have the right strategy in place.
Microsoft Purview is the collection of risk, data governance, and compliance solutions created by Microsoft for Microsoft 365 users. The solutions enable companies to govern, manage, and protect their data estate, particularly in the age of hybrid and distributed work.
Fundamentally, Microsoft Purview combines the former Microsoft 365 compliance and Azure Purview solutions into a single service for visibility into data assets across your organisation. The “Communication Compliance” section of this offering focuses specifically on preserving the quality and safety of communications.
Defining Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance
Part of Microsoft’s comprehensive collection of compliance tools, Microsoft Purview “Communication Compliance” is an Insider Risk offering designed to minimise communication issues. The service helps users to detect, capture, and respond to inappropriate messages in Teams.
Companies can scan internal and external communications for policy matches with custom policies and templates and assign reviewers to investigate issues. The solution assists business leaders with implementing and championing:
- Corporate policies: Requiring users to comply with specific ethical standards and acceptable use policies in all business communications. This can help companies reduce harassment, threats, and offensive or inappropriate language.
- Risk management: Using communication compliance policies within Purview helps to identify and reduce potential legal and risk issues, minimising problems before they occur. You could, for instance, scan messages throughout your organisation for unauthorised conflicts of interest and sharing of private data.
- Regulatory compliance: Most companies have some regulatory compliance standards to consider. These regulations often require organisations to implement supervisory policies for monitoring appropriate messaging. For instance, you could enforce policies to prevent users from sharing sensitive financial information in Teams.
Features of Purview Communication Compliance
The Communication Compliance toolkit from Microsoft comes with various features to empower companies in ensuring compliance via their messaging platforms. These include:
Intelligent, customisable templates
Intelligent custom templates in communication compliance allow users to apply machine learning to detect possible organisational violations. Pre-configured templates are available to help users track familiar sources of communication problems. There are also built-in machine learning tools and image classifiers to help with scanning content at speed.
A policy-building wizard is also available for users who need to develop new compliance policies from scratch and implement specific conditions.
Flexible remediation workflows
Included remediation workflows in Purview Communication Compliance allow users to identify and act on policy-breaking messages in a Teams environment. You can set up conversation policy matching strategies to alert reviewers automatically when a policy issue is identified.
Teams users can also leverage keyword highlighting to track terms matching policy conditions, set up exact or “near duplicate” detection, and implement specific filters. There’s optical character recognition for investigating images and handwritten text in chat messages. Plus, teams can view historical notes from users who reported policy violations.
Other features of the workflow solution include pattern detection notifications for when an issue is recurring, automatic translation, and attachment detection when linked content might be included in a message.
Actionable insights
The Purview Communication Compliance service has access to a new interactive dashboard for reviewers and investigators. Here, users can track alerts and policy matches, receiving proactive, intelligent alerts when an issue needs immediate attention. You can sort pending items by severity and filter through users and policy types.
