Microsoft 365 offers a wide range of compliance features. The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook includes comprehensive coverage of compliance capabilities from retention policies to eDiscovery. And what we can’t cover in the book, we cover here.
Exchange Online allows users to add personal retention tags to their maiboxes through OWA settings. Some organizations don’t like this, so they can deploy user role assignment policies to block the feature. It;s something that you could consider doing if you’re preparing to switchover to Office 365 retention policies to impose the same retention regime across multiple workloads.
Teams does a good job of storing compliance records in Exchange Online mailboxes so that the data is available for Office 365 eDiscovery. But the number of records can impact the mailbox quotas of frontline workers, especially if they send graphics in personal and group chats. Here’s some PowerShell to help discover how much mailbox quota is being absorbed by compliance records.
Microsoft launched the MailItemsAccessed audit event (to capture when email is opened) in January, reversed the roll-out in April, and now might restart sometime in Q3. It’s an odd situation that isn’t really explained by a statement from Microsoft. Are they going to charge extra for this audit event? Will they be analyzing the events? Or does Office 365 capture too many mail items accessed events daily?
A busy week included speaking engagements in Germany and Oslo. The Experts Live Norway event saw Tony talk about Office 365 data governance, a topic he thinks he knows well. You can grab a copy of the presentation he used in Oslo from this post.
Exchange Online supports inactive mailboxes as a way to keep mailbox data online after Office 365 accounts are removed. Inactive mailboxes are available as long as a hold exists on them. You can update mailbox properties to exclude all or some org-wide holds. If you exclude holds from a mailbox, you run the risk that Exchange will permanently remove the mailbox. If that’s what you want, all is well, but if it’s not, then you might not be so happy.
Office 365 supervision policies can now make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect offensive language in email and Teams communications. The data model covers a wide range of problematic language, but only in English. You can go ahead and cheerfully continue to swear in French, German, and other languages with no danger of being detected by policy.
On May 7, Microsoft eventually fixed a truncation bug that affected group events (creation, add member, etc.) ingested into the Office 365 audit log. The fix took far too long coming and the overall response is certainly not Microsoft’s finest hour. Audit events, after all, are pretty important in compliance scenarios and it’s not good when those events are incomplete.
Sometimes Office 365 can be infuriating. My latest tribulation came in the form of missing retention labels, which disappeared from SharePoint Online without any reason for two weeks. Some labels returned due to auto-label policies, but any applied to documents manually had a vacation somewhere in the bowels of the services. It wasn’t a good experience.
The Microsoft 365 Security and Microsoft 365 Compliance Centers are now generally available. The new consoles will eventually replace the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center (SCC) but some work is needed to fill out their functionality and make the switchover possible. In the meantime, the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook writing team will stay focused on the SCC. And when the time’s right, we’ll switchover.
Although Office 365 supervision policies are intended to monitor a subset of user communications, usually involving specific groups of people, you might want to use a policy to monitor all email. In that case, how do you make sure that your policy has everyone in scope? The problem is that supervision policies don’t support dynamic distribution lists, so you need to do some work to build and maintain a distribution list containing all user mailboxes.
Office 365 content searches now support a hard-delete (permanent deletion) option for the purge action, but only for mailbox items. You can purge up to 10 items at a go. If you have more to purge, you just have to keep on purging until everything is gone. Or use the Search-Mailbox cmdlet, which keeps on proving its usefulness to administrators who need to remove lots of mailbox items quickly.
Security alerts from Office 365 Cloud App Security now flow into the Office 365 Audit Log, which means that you can run the Search-UnifiedAuditLog to find the alerts. Unhappily, more work than should be needed is necessary to extract the interesting information from the alert records.
A new report commissioned by Microsoft explains how Exchange Online and the Security and Compliance Center meet the electronic records requirements of regulatory bodies like the SEC and FINRA. Within the report, there’s some news about changes to the way that Office 365 handles Teams compliance records stored in Exchange Online. And after all that, we consider how some backup vendors treat Teams compliance records as equivalent to the data stored in the Teams Azure services.
Exchange Online now captures session identifiers in its mailbox and admin audit records that are ingested in the Office 365 audit log. That’s interesting and useful, but how do you access and interpret this information on a practical level?
Azure Information Protection rights management templates now support the Any Authenticated Users permission to allow Office 365 users to share email and documents with anyone who can authenticate with Azure Active Directory or has an MSA account or uses a federated service.
Microsoft has updated its retention period for Office audit records from 90 to 365 days, but only for accounts with Office 365 E5 licenses. On another front, the problem with truncated audit records for Azure Active Directory events still persists.
Everyone knows how simple date-based retention works, but what happens when you want to tie retention to a specific event, like the signing of a contract or the completion of a project? That’s when you need event-based retention.
Exchange Online sends its mailbox audit records to the Office 365 audit log. You can search the log to discover who deleted messages from mailboxes, normally only an issue when delegates are involved.
A little known fact is that you can use graphic symbols and characters in Office 365 labels. It might bring a splash of color to your compliance and retention efforts, especially in a world where emojis are everywhere. After all, the symbols are just character codes that computers can process and Office 365 is designed to be multilingual and cope with different character sets (like the way Teams deals with Hebrew and Arabic).
Content Searches Find Teams Compliance Items When someone leaves your company, you might need to preserve their Office 365 data. The steps needed to preserve user information stored in Email, OneDrive, and SharePoint are straightforward, but what about the messages the employee sent using Teams? As it turns out, an Office 365 content search or …