Viva Engage communities now support Purview container management labels (sensitivity labels that manage settings for groups, teams, communities, etc.). The update makes it possible to manage community settings like privacy through labels instead of settings applied to individual communities. Once communities have container management labels, you can manage the labels in the same way as when applied to Teams and Microsoft 365 groups.
Sensitive Information types (SITs) are definitions of data like credit card numbers used by DLP rules to detect potential external sharing violations. Knowing what SIT to use in a DLP rule is often difficult, which is why the Purview developers have added a test option to allow tenants to test files against individual SITs or all SITs to see what happens.
The Get-AdaptiveScopeMembers cmdlet reveals details of adaptive scope membership to make it possible to report this information programmatically. The task is not as simple as you might imagine. Summary records must be separated from member records, which can reflect add or remove operations. And there’s the question of pagination for large adaptive scope. All explained here with a PowerShell script to help.
Microsoft offers several PAYG services to Microsoft 365 tenants. Data Security Investigations (DSI) is the newest. These services can rack up compute charges to perform processing (in the case of DSI, AI processing of items found in Microsoft 365 sources). If tenants don’t take care, they might end up with big Azure bills. Be aware, prepare, measure, and minimize processing to avoid large charges.
As part of the modernization of the Purview eDiscovery solution, Microsoft will simplify the content searches UX in February 2026 to remove features that are inappropriate for the way that content searches are intended to be used. The change is logical and reasonable because you should use a full eDiscovery case to access all the eDiscovery functionality.
During the quiet holiday period, I tested the new Purview Data Security Investigations (DSI) solution, which seems to be put together from bits of Microsoft 365 together with Security Copilot and some generative AI. Assembling new solutions from existing components makes sense because it reduces engineering effort. Without real data, it’s hard to know how effective DSI is, but the cost of an investigation came as a real surprise.
MC1211579 (3 January 2026) announces the retirement of four legacy SharePoint compliance features in favor of Purview Data Lifecycle management and Records management. It’s always unsurprising when Microsoft chooses to remove old features developed for on-premises and replaces them with better online options, which is exactly what’s happening here. Some tenants might face additional licensing requirements for Purview.
