Learn
What Purview looks like in production. Guides, real scenarios, and the gotchas nobody warns you about.
Every article here is 5 minutes or less. Microsoft Learn has the full technical docs. We distil that down to what actually matters in practice - the business context, the common mistakes, and the things you need to know before you deploy.
Guides
Step-by-step approaches for common Purview tasks.
How to structure DLP policies so you can actually manage them
Most orgs create a handful of broad DLP policies and then struggle to manage the alerts. Split by workload and information category instead - it unlocks workload-specific conditions, cleaner alerts, and policies you can actually hand off to a team.
One-click policies sound great - here is why you should not use them as-is
Microsoft Purview now offers one-click policies through DSPM that can secure your tenant in minutes. The catch is that several jump straight to block mode. In production, that breaks things. A crawl-walk-run approach gives you the same protection without the business disruption.
Sensitivity label groups are replacing parent labels - what you need to do
Microsoft is replacing the parent-sublabel hierarchy with label groups. The migration is irreversible and rolling out now. Here is what changed, why it matters, and how to prepare.
Trainable classifiers vs Sensitive Information Types - and why you should use both
SITs match patterns. Classifiers match content types. On their own they are useful. Together they dramatically reduce false positives and strengthen your auto-labelling, DLP, and retention policies.
Use CloudAppEvents to actually see what your DLP policies are catching
The Purview DLP alerts page tells you something matched. CloudAppEvents in Defender XDR tells you everything - the policy, the rule, the SIT, the file, the user, and the action. Query it with KQL, export to CSV, and build Power BI dashboards that show what is really happening.
How I passed the SC-401
A personal account of passing the SC-401 Microsoft Information Security Administrator exam. What I used to prepare, what helped most, and what I would do differently.
Scenarios
Real deployments. What was configured, what went wrong, what worked.
Changing a DLP policy caused thousands of alerts on old data
A routine DLP policy change triggered SharePoint to re-scan every file in scope. Alerting lit up with thousands of matches on data that had been sitting there for years. Here is why it happens and how to avoid it.
Preventing data leaks when employees leave
A 200-person professional services firm discovered a departing employee was exfiltrating client contracts. Here's how Insider Risk Management and DLP caught it, and what would have happened without them.
Professional ServicesPreparing SharePoint for Copilot rollout
Before enabling Copilot, this 500-person company discovered their SharePoint permissions were a mess. Copilot would have surfaced HR data, salary bands, and M&A plans to everyone. Here's the governance cleanup they did first.
Financial ServicesMeeting GDPR requirements with Purview
An EU-headquartered company needed to demonstrate GDPR compliance to their regulator. Rather than hiring a consultancy for a six-figure sum, they used Compliance Manager and built evidence collection into their daily workflow.
HealthcareProtecting client data in a law firm
Law firms handle the most sensitive data imaginable, and often have the weakest controls. This mid-size firm deployed labels, DLP, and eDiscovery to meet their professional obligations and insurance requirements.
LegalStopping accidental external sharing
An employee accidentally shared a board pack with a vendor via Teams. The DLP policy caught it in real-time, blocked the share, and educated the user, all without IT involvement. Here's how the policies were designed to do this without creating alert fatigue.
ManufacturingGotchas
The things that catch everyone out. Learn from other people's mistakes.
Audit log retention is not what you think
Standard audit retains logs for 180 days. If you need to investigate something that happened 7 months ago, the data is gone. Most organisations discover this during an investigation, not before. Here is what each licence tier actually gives you and how to avoid the gap.
Microsoft lets you use Purview features you aren't licensed for
Unlike most software, Microsoft does not lock you out of unlicensed features. The buttons are there, the settings work, and policies deploy. But you are in breach of your licensing agreement. Here is why this matters and how to check.
DLP in Teams works differently to every other workload
If you are expecting Teams DLP to work like Exchange DLP, you are in for a surprise. Messages are evaluated after sending, not before. There are no email notifications. And you need E5 just to cover chat messages. Here is what you need to know before turning it on.
Auto-labelling doesn't classify all your data at rest
You deploy auto-labelling and assume everything is covered. It is not. Service-side classification only processes recently active files. Years of historical data sits untouched. Here's what actually happens and what to do about it.
DLP policies don't apply to files already shared externally
You deploy a DLP policy to block external sharing of Confidential files. Great, but it only applies to new shares. Everything that was shared before the policy? Still out there. Here's how to find and fix it.
Copilot surfaces content from sites users forgot they had access to
Copilot respects permissions. That's the problem. Permissions in most tenants are a mess. Users ask Copilot a question and get results from HR sites, M&A folders, and salary spreadsheets they technically have access to but were never supposed to see.
Have something to share?
If you have a guide, scenario, or gotcha from your own Purview deployment, we would love to hear it. All submissions are reviewed before publishing.