Category: Compliance Centre

Microsoft Purview – compliance in a box

Posted by on in Compliance Centre, Information Governance, Microsoft 365, Uncategorized

How to govern, protect, and manage your data estate

Microsoft Purview seems to be the new kid on the block. Everyone is talking about it – but what exactly is it, what can it do and, moreover, does your organisation need it? Marc Stephenson, Director here at Metataxis, takes a look and shares his thoughts on this Microsoft solution:

According to www.dictionary.com: Purview. Noun. The range of operation, authority, control, concern, etc. The range of vision, insight, or understanding.”

I think Microsoft has actually chosen a good name for the formally known as the “Compliance Center” product suite. (Please Microsoft can we try not to re-skin, re-factor or generally re-arrange this important area of functionality for a while now!)

At Metataxis, we are starting to find that getting to grips with Microsoft Purview is a growing demand.

What is Microsoft Purview?

Microsoft officially describes this tool as: “a unified data governance solution to help manage and govern your on-premises, multicloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. Easily create a holistic, up-to-date map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification, and end-to-end data lineage.”

Understand and govern data across your entire data estate

For years, organisations have recognised that they need to “do something” to get their compliance and records management ship in order. Today, with more sensitive data stored across apps, clouds, and devices, it’s never been harder to understand and govern sensitive information, identify data risks and manage regulatory requirements to remain compliant. And this is why only recently its has started to drive operational need.

And therein lies the key word: “operational.”

Many organisations already have compliance regimes in place, covering various levels of thoroughness, value, and application, but until they are actually in use, in other words, operational, it’s just good intentions, and maybe for some simply just box-ticking.

How Metataxis can help

Metataxis consultants are technical experts in all aspects of information risk, compliance, and records management, but crucially, we’ve spent many years implementing real-world Microsoft 365 systems for our clients. The art of this is the ability to translate the business need for compliance into a workable and scalable set of Microsoft 365 configuration settings.

Alas, this invariably involves some compromises, especially if you don’t have an E5 subscription, and only have an E1 subscription.

Thankfully, Metataxis has developed several approaches to leverage whatever Microsoft licence subscription you have and whatever compliance regime you have, into something that will work for your organisation. After all, your organisation’s “range of operation, authority, control, concern, …vision, insight, or understanding” is kind of important.

So, if you’re looking for governance, protection, and compliance solutions for your organisation’s data and assets across your environment – simply get in touch and we’d be happy to discuss how we can help you with Microsoft Purview.

20 years ago today, part 3: The evolution of SharePoint

Posted by on in Compliance Centre, Information Architecture, Metadata, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, UncategorizedLeave a comment

This blog is a continuation of a series of reminiscences and predictions on all things
information management, to celebrate 20 years of Metataxis.

Once upon a time, there was a new Microsoft software package called “SharePoint Portal Server 2001”. Only a few organisations had it, and it was of course on-premise, not in the cloud. It wasn’t until SharePoint 2003 came along that organisations started to notice this complex and powerful software platform. Many versions and twenty years later we now have the all conquering Microsoft 365. Such deep and all consuming functionality that I sometimes wonder that it might take over everything…  

Get Control of Retention with the Microsoft 365 Compliance Centre

Posted by on in Compliance Centre, Information Governance, Information Management, Microsoft 365, Retention Management, SharePointLeave a comment

Out of control growth of records and documents held on SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and other applications is a problem common for many. The Compliance Centre provides records and Information Managers with a great toolset to help manage retention in Microsoft 365. But while what is on offer is very sophisticated, it’s not always entirely intuitive. It’s a steep learning curve, especially if you happen to come from an information industry background as opposed to a technical one.

There’s a lot of advice and guidance from SharePoint practitioners, which is really helpful but sometimes assumes a great deal of familiarity with Microsoft products. So we put together a few short demo videos providing an explanation of retention management in the Compliance Centre and how you might want to apply this – from a records management perspective. 

You can watch the snippet of our first demo below or for the full video and access to the full series visit our Youtube channel. We hope you find these useful to add to your learning and if you want to ask us any questions about the Compliance Centre please use our contact form on the right.