Compliance

This month’s cumulative update for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update sees the OS build bumped to version 16299.248.

Now that so many apps (like Teams) create Office 365 Groups, it’s logical that some of the groups will serve their purpose and then need to be archived. Office 365 offers no way to do this, but conceptually it’s a reasonably easy task and something that PowerShell handles with aplomb.

Compliance is always a hot topic, so in this Ask the Admin, I’ll look at how Microsoft’s DSCEA can be used to create compliance reports for servers configured using PowerShell DSC.

Creating great content in Microsoft Teams is all very well. But what happens when some not-so-good content turns up or the CEO posts something secret into a public team? You might just want to remove those messages. It’s all good as long as you don’t need to remove complete threads or messages from multiple teams, at which point things get tiresome.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith looks at how Microsoft’s new service can help organizations meet compliance requirements.

Microsoft’s Compliance Manager is intended to help cloud tenants cope with regulations like ISO 27001 and GDPR. The Compliance Manager has a nice dashboard, but it is passive and offers very weak options in terms of organizing the work needed to achieve compliance. But Office 365 has Planner and Teams, and it is easy to create the necessary collaboration structure to allow people to work on GDPR controls.

Office 365 includes supervision policies to allow tenants to monitor email traffic between selected groups to ensure that they comply with regulations. Supervision policies are easy to set up, but be careful about the workload involved in processing the captured email.

You can capture Exchange mailbox events in the Office 365 audit log, but only if you remember to enable auditing for target mailboxes. Exchange Online doesn’t enable new mailboxes for auditing by default, so administrators must remember to enable the mailboxes manually – and check for new mailboxes periodically. If you don’t, nothing is recorded and your audit log will be empty.

The new Office 365 data governance framework has been updated to allow content marked with classification labels to receive a manual review before being removed. It’s the kind of thing that makes data governance administrators happy.

In this Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains why SCM was killed off and how the Security Compliance Toolkit stacks up in comparison.