Supervision lets you define policies that capture email, chats, and 3rd-party communications in your organization, so internal or external reviewers can examine them. Reviewers can then classify these communications and make sure they’re compliant with your organization’s policies.
Supervision policies in Office 365 are commonly leveraged in organizations under regulatory oversight that face significant financial penalties if policy violations happen. If compliance is something important to your organization, you now can monitor email, 3rd-party communications, and recently added Microsoft Teams chat and channel communications.
When considering deploying supervision policies, it is crucial to consider your corporate policies, risks, and regulatory compliance that you may fall under. If you’re at a high risk of harassment, you may want to deploy supervision policies to help monitor human resource violations. Maybe you’re in the process of a merger or acquisition and need to monitor for potential legal exposure if the information leaked.
When planning your supervision process, you will build out your supervision policy, define the supervised users, select the reviewers. When building out the policies, you will want to determine what elements you want to monitor. You have the option to monitor Exchange email, Microsoft Teams chat and channel communications, Skype for Business Online conversations, and third-party sources like Facebook, Dropbox, etc. if you import the data into the Office 365.
Within the policy, you have the option of including sensitive data types such as financial, medical, and health, privacy-based data. You can also build your custom keyword dictionaries, such as internal project code names. When you’re thinking about harassment, can you monitor for offensive language such as profanities, slurs, taunts, and disguised expressions.
A few quick notes, as of today’s emails subject to defined policies are processed in near real-time and can be tested immediately after the policy is configured. Chats in Microsoft Teams can take up to 24 hours to fully process in a policy.
Take a look at the following resources for more information and configuration guidance on deploying supervision policies. Also, if your running Microsoft 365, take a look at the new Communication Compliance portal that is currently in preview.
Resources
Full details on Supervision policies in Office 365 are located here. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/supervision-policies
How to configure supervision policies for Office 365 are located here.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/configure-supervision-policies
Also check out the new Communication Compliance in Microsoft 365 (preview) which adds additional features to Supervision by adding Intelligent customizable templates, Flexible remediation workflows, and actionable insights. For more details go to this link.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/communication-compliance
