Nikki Chapple

How to use Microsoft 365 Retention Policies and Labels

Posted on 29 January 2023Updated on 30 January 2023by Nikki Chapple

Are you struggling to stay compliant with industry regulations and company policies when it comes to managing your organization’s data? Look no further, because Microsoft 365 retention can help you stay compliant and secure. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management provides powerful tools to enable you to automatically retain or delete content based on your retention schedules.

In this blog, I will walk you through the basics of setting up retention policies and labels in Microsoft 365, so you can start meeting regulatory requirements and protecting your organisation’s sensitive information.

How to use sensitivity labels with your PDF files

Posted on 18 December 2022Updated on 22 December 2022by Nikki Chapple

Did you know you can now label your PDF files with the same sensitivity labels you use with your Word, PowerPoint and Excel files?

Using Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, you can add a visible classification label, protect your PDF files with encryption and add visible marking such as headers, footers and watermarks. Your PDF file now respects any Data loss Prevention policies, such as blocking external sharing of confidential data.

How to allow auto-forwarding to Teams channels

Posted on 31 October 2022Updated on 1 November 2022by Nikki Chapple

Email forwarding can be useful, but poses a security risk due to the potential disclosure of information. Therefore the Anti-spam outbound policy blocks the auto-forwarding at the tenant level by default. Although this minimises the security risks, it hampers productivity since there are valid reasons to allow auto-forwarding to an external domain.

There are valid use cases for external email forwarding such as:

To support the adoption of Microsoft Teams and the concept of working in Teams rather than sending email. However, users cannot auto-forward emails to a Teams channel, because the Teams channel email addresses are external email addresses, for example (uniqueid@emea.teams.ms or uniqueid@uk.teams.ms).
Auto-forwarding emails to a third-party system, such as CRM or ticketing system for processing.

Read on to learn how to allow auto-forwarding to Teams channels and other authorised external domains to increase productivity and reduce security risks.

How to protect your Microsoft Teams, Groups and Sites

Posted on 25 October 2022Updated on 26 October 2022by Nikki Chapple

How secure are your Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams?

Did you know that your Guest access and external sharing controls are managed at the tenant level? As a result, security becomes ‘one size fits all’, rather than providing granular security controls based on Teams, Groups, and Sites’ confidentiality requirements.

For example

When guest access is enabled, Team owners can add external guests to all Microsoft Teams, Groups and SharePoint sites.
When you create a new Team or a Group, the default SharePoint external sharing is set to New and existing guests unless your tenant setting is more restrictive. So Team members can share Teams content externally.

Check out the information below to learn how you can use sensitivity labels to apply granular security controls to Teams, Groups, and Sites.

How to manage Microsoft 365 evergreen change with Power Automate

Posted on 25 September 2022Updated on 25 October 2022by Nikki Chapple

Are you effectively managing your Microsoft 365 evergreen change?

The pace of change in Microsoft 365 is rapid as Microsoft constantly delivers new features, updates to enhance customer value and ways to secure the environment better. We all know it is essential to keep on top of this constant flow of changes, but keeping track of the evergreen changes across the multiple different Microsoft 365 services can be challenging.

Microsoft post all change messages in the Microsoft 365 Message Center. However, the Message Center is not a workflow tool, so triaging and tracking the changes is difficult. In addition, people spend too much time manually copying content from Message Center to other applications and notifying stakeholders rather than assessing the change itself!

So how do you remove this manual overhead and automate your Microsoft 365 evergreen change process?

Read on for top tips and guidance on how to sync your Microsoft 365 messages to a Planner board, and then use Power Automate to automate and customise your process. My Power Automate Flow removes those repetitive tasks, giving you more time to focus on the triaging.

How Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager supports your compliance journey

Posted on 27 August 2022Updated on 10 November 2022by Nikki Chapple

We are in the middle of a digital revolution where information is a strategic asset, hybrid working is the norm and protecting your information assets is crucial to maintaining trust and meeting compliance requirements. As a result, organisations are now seeking external certifications such as ISO27001, Cyber Essentials or NIST 800-53 to manage compliance risks and to provide assurance of their overall information security and compliance posture.

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager is a great solution to demystify the complexities of compliance by offering templates, improvements actions and risk-based reporting.

Using Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, I was able to suggest best practices for our Microsoft 365 environment to help CloudWay achieve ISO27001 certification. Read CloudWay’s blog on becoming an ISO 27001 certified company.

Read on to see how Compliance Manager can support your compliance journey.

Do you know you can now upload your improvements actions into the Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Posted on 11 August 2022Updated on 25 October 2022by Nikki Chapple

📢It’s good news for Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager.

You can now bulk import your updated improvement actions directly into Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager using the Improvement actions export report. With no APIs or programmatic interfaces, bulk import is a significant improvement.

Having the ability to work on your improvement actions outside of the Microsoft Purview Admin Center is extremely helpful. You can work on the improvement actions with multiple businesses and IT stakeholders without giving them admin rights. In the past, any changes to improvement actions had to be manually updated in Compliance Manager. Organisations often only focus on the initial export of data, so they miss out on automatic testing notifications, reporting and updates.

By using the Excel export file to bulk upload your changes into Compliance Manager, there is no need to rekey any information, which is a significant time-saving improvement.

Additionally, keeping the Compliance Manager updated lets you see the impact of changes to regulations or configuration changes via automated testing.

Read on to find out more.

How to manage guest access reviews in Microsoft 365

Posted on 26 June 2022Updated on 25 October 2022by Nikki Chapple

With guest access switched on for Microsoft Teams, do you have a process to manage guest access reviews?

It is easy for Team owners to invite external guests into their Team. However, how do you proactively review guest accounts to ensure people only have access as long as they need it?

With internal users, there are joiners, movers and leavers processes to manage access and reviews, but these processes typically exclude guest users.

Read on to see how you create a regular review of external guest access to ensure they only have access as long as necessary.

How to perform Teams and user admin tasks without leaving Teams

Posted on 12 April 2022Updated on 25 October 2022by Nikki Chapple

Did you know you can perform Teams and user admin tasks without leaving Microsoft Teams?

Just add the Admin-Microsoft 365 app to Teams and perform common User and Team admin-related tasks without leaving Microsoft Teams. To use the app you need appropriate admin permissions.

Read on to find out how

How to apply just-in-time access to Security & Compliance roles

Posted on 4 April 2022Updated on 25 October 2022by Nikki Chapple

I am often asked by clients how they can provide additional levels of controls to their Security and Compliance privileged roles to mitigate the risks of excessive, unnecessary, or misused access permissions to important resources.

Microsoft recommends the following best practice for managing privileged accounts:

Use least privileged access
Turn on multi-factor authentication for all your administrator accounts
Use Privileged Identity Management to grant just-in-time access with optional approvals
Configure recurring access reviews to revoke unneeded permissions over time

If you have Azure AD Premium 2 licensing you can use Azure AD Privilege Identity Management (PIM) to provide just-in-time access to privileged admin accounts. PIM only provides just-in-time access to Azure AD and Azure privileged roles. The issue with Security and Compliance roles is that they are managed in Security and Compliance admin Centers and not in Azure AD.

So how can we protect Security and Compliance roles with just-in-time access to mitigate the risks of excessive, unnecessary, or misused access permissions to important resources?

Read on to discover how to use Privileged Access Groups in PIM to indirectly provide just-in-time access to your Security & Compliance roles. In addition, this process will work with other non-Azure AD roles such as roles from Exchange or SharePoint.