Microsoft 365 to warn you sending inappropriate emails
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Key notes
- Microsoft has an upgrade that will reduce the time to identify breaches in company communications thus making it easy to identify inappropriate emails sent by employees.
- Though still under development, the Microsoft 365 update is expected to roll out soon rather than later.
- Companies will benefit a lot from these updates though it has not been clearly outlined how Microsoft is planning to cut the investigation time in communication breaches
Microsoft 365 compliance center is expected to soon receive an upgrade that will cut the time it takes to identify breaches of company communication policies drastically.
The new feature has the ability to monitor messages for inappropriate content — if a worker sends an offensive message or one that violates their company’s privacy or harassment policies, Microsoft will flag it for supervisors immediately.
The new feature, which is currently under development, allows organizations to reduce the time it takes to review inappropriate emails. It will reduce investigation time to under an hour allowing the company to respond to compliance alerts.
Employees monitoring
Many businesses already monitor the way in which employees interact with one another over email and communication software. Now, the Microsoft team is giving those businesses a more powerful tool to do so: It can warn managers when they spot inappropriate messages between workers.
Some consider this kind of activity an invasion of privacy, but it is justified by the need to pursue cybercriminals and avoid data exfiltration by malicious insiders.
Although office communications policies are meant to keep employees from infringing on one another’s privacy, business software can be employed in bullying or harassing ways.
Microsoft 365 Monitoring
Microsoft 365 upgrade comes with a dashboard that shows the number of reviews carried out by each reviewer, highlights high-risk accounts and messages, and provides an overview of policy violations detected.
It also includes several out-of-the-box policies for identifying inappropriate language and harassment. Administrators can create custom policies with specific keywords or phrases to be flagged, as well as set rules for messages sent or received.
Microsoft report shows when an inappropriate message is detected and flagged, a team owner will receive a notification in the form of an email asking them to review it.
The notification will inform the user of the message’s content, who sent it, and the date and time it was sent. This can all be reviewed from an “incident activity report” accessible through Microsoft 365’s Security and Compliance Center.
Business benefits
Microsoft estimates many companies to benefit from this new upgrade as it will protect employees and the company data in general.
The time taken to investigate inappropriate messages will be reduced significantly from days to hours. This means managers can deal with incidents immediately before they have a chance to escalate.
Though the new updates are exciting for companies it is still unclear precisely how Microsoft will manage to cut the investigation time by such a significant margin.
Is your company having challenges with inappropriate communication? How do you feel about the coming upgrade on Microsoft 365? Let us know from the comment section.
