Communication Compliance with Microsoft Purview

What this guide covers

Communication Compliance is the most politically loaded tool in Purview. It reads your employees' messages across Teams, Exchange, Viva Engage, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and connected third-party sources, looking for harassment, threats, regulatory violations, and code-of-conduct breaches. Deploy it carelessly and you have built workplace surveillance that your works council and your lawyers will rightly tear apart. Deploy it well and you have a defensible, privacy-respecting control that catches real problems early. The difference is almost entirely in the configuration and the governance around it.

That governance is the whole game, and it is where most of this book lives. Who can see what, how reviewers are scoped, how identities are pseudonymized, and how you prove the program is fair rather than a fishing expedition. The mechanics are the easy part. Whether you are allowed to monitor, and whether you can defend the program when someone asks why you are reading their messages, is the real work, and Microsoft scatters that answer across a dozen disconnected pages.

This is the connected account those pages never assemble in one place. Every policy path, license boundary, classifier, and privacy setting is grounded in current Microsoft Learn and validated in a live Microsoft 365 E5 lab, not asserted from memory. You do not need a production tenant to follow along. A Microsoft 365 E5 trial and a willingness to generate a few test messages are enough to build and review a real policy end to end.

Chapter map

1. What Communication Compliance Is, and the Privacy Tightrope
2. Licensing and Prerequisites
3. Policies and Templates
4. Building a Policy: Scope, Conditions, and Review
5. The Classifiers: Trainable Classifiers, Threats, Harassment, and Regulatory
6. Reviewing Alerts and Investigating Messages
7. Remediation, Escalation, and Notifications
8. Privacy, Pseudonymization, and the Governance Model
9. Reporting and Tuning
10. Operational Reality: Coverage, Gotchas, and Troubleshooting

Appendices: PowerShell for Communication Compliance; Microsoft Learn Bibliography; Communication Compliance Readiness Checklist; Standing Up a Trial Tenant for Communication Compliance.

Who it is for

This book is for the security, compliance, and risk engineers standing up or auditing a Communication Compliance program who want one document that connects the policy machinery the docs leave scattered, for the HR, legal, and privacy stakeholders who own the policy the tool enforces and have to defend it. It is also for the reviewers and investigators who triage alerts and need to know exactly what they can and cannot see, and for anyone working toward the Microsoft Applied Skills credential "Implement retention, eDiscovery, and Communication Compliance in Microsoft Purview," which puts this product squarely on the assessment.