M365 Changelog: (Updated) Announcing continuous compliance assessments in the Microsoft 365 compliance center

MC296437 – Updated April 19, 2022: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

Microsoft is enhancing Compliance Manager’s automated testing and evidence generation functionality and enabling additional improvement actions and solutions for automated testing.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 72222.

When this will happen:

Rollout will begin in late February (previously early February) and is expected to be complete by early May (previously mid-April).

How this will affect your organization:

With this update, Microsoft is adding testing automation to a subset (40+) of Compliance Manager actions; if these actions are relevant to a tenant’s compliance assessments, a continually–updated test status will now be displayed depending on whether the tenant has successfully completed the action. Microsoft is also enhancing the automated testing experience such that for these actions, admins will see additional test result information, including testing logic and test evidence, if applicable.

Microsoft is also improving the automation settings experience where you can determine whether you want a specific action to be tested manually or automatically, including adding a new section in the action drill-down where you can view or specify the action source. To access, go to Compliance Manager > Settings.

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Access Compliance Manager by visiting the appropriate link for your cloud environment:

• Microsoft 365 compliance center for WW and GCC
• Microsoft 365 compliance center for GCC-H
• Microsoft 365 compliance center for DoD

What you need to do to prepare:

Testing automation can be enabled or disabled at any time within Compliance Manager settings.

• If you have previously opted to disable automation, there will be no change.
• If you have previously opted to enable automation, these actions will be automated at rollout. Note: If you have chosen to enable automation, but have already entered data in the manual testing space for an action, Microsoft will keep the action set to manually tested to avoid overwriting customer data. If you opt to automate any such action, all previous implementation notes and documentation will be retained, however manually entered testing status and date(s) will be overwritten by the new automated test.

Learn more:

• Microsoft Compliance Manager.

Additional information