In the previous post I talked about retention policies and how you can apply them to your environment. To keep things simple, I used static scopes in that article. But since adaptive scopes are the recommended approach for retention policies I want to show you what they can do, and why Microsoft recommends them to be used instead of static scopes.

One of the core features of Microsoft Purview is Data Lifecycle Management (DLM), formerly known as Microsoft Information Governance. DLM is all about providing you with the tools you need to keep information that you need, and delete the information that you don’t. This process is of great importance for compliance with regulations, risk management en liability management.

Data Lifecycle Management in Microsoft Purview has a great overlap with Records Management, although they also have their differences. However this is something for another article. This article will explain how to configure the basics of Data Lifecycle Management, and will show you the end-user experience.

Information Barriers in Microsoft 365 can be used to block (or allow) communication between groups of users and will apply to Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. An example for a use case is a R&D department which may not communicate with the marketing department. The example used in this article is a multi-national company where users in the Netherlands are not allowed to communicate with users in Belgium because of high regulatory laws and requirements.

In this article, I will introduce you to Information Barriers in Microsoft Purview by walking you through setting up the backend and show you the impact it has on your users. Let’s go!

Setting the scene

For this demonstration, we are going to use the following employees in our fictional company:

1. Allan Deyoung and Adele Vance, working in the Netherlands Office.
2. Christie Cline and Megan Bowen, working in the Belgium Office.

Microsoft Purview has a pretty sweet feature called “Compliance Manager”. It can be used to assess your Microsoft 365 (and other non-Microsoft) environments based on various regulations like “ISO 27001” or you can create your own custom assessment that’s not based on a regulation. (Do note that at the time of writing this article, the creation of custom assessments is disabled due to an update of the process by Microsoft.)

Basics first, as always

Before we dive into the world of assessments and regulations, let’s start with the basic components of compliance manager:

Microsoft Purview. I’m certain it’s features can seem a little overwhelming when first strolling through the documentation of the product. It sure was for me. In this blog series I want to give you insight in Microsoft’s product for managing data security, compliance and governance for the Microsoft 365 suite, Microsoft Purview.

This article acts as an overview of the features in Microsoft Purview, how they fit in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and what feature can be used to reach a certain goal. Each feature (which is underlined) will be explained in a separate article, where I’ll use this overview to link to each of those articles.

First things first. Microsoft Purview is a unified solution that used to consist of 2 products: Azure Purview and Microsoft 365 Compliance solutions. In this blog series I’ll focus on the Microsoft 365 side of the product.

Overview – The big picture