Compliance center and Security center are rolling out to Office 365 customers

Since we seem to be on a compliance-related spree, here’s another article on the topic. Over this week, the specialized Compliance center and Security center have finally started rolling out to Office 365 customers. They were announced back at Ignite 2018, then released in preview in the beginning of 2019, but only for Microsoft 365 customers. Now, an year later, Office 365 customers can finally get their hands on the new portals.

I already covered those new portals back when they were initially made available in preview, so I will not go over them in detail here. You can find my original article over at Practical 365, rest assured not much has changed since then. Some new “cards” have been added, few things have been renamed (for example you can find Supervision policies under Communication compliance now, although the term itself is not mentioned anywhere else on the portal), and we have a customizable navigation pane now (or are supposed to have it, as it doesn’t seem to work for me just yet), akin to the Office 365 admin center.

In terms of new functionalities, you might find the Compliance score or the Data Classification Content explorer useful (both are in preview still). Third-party data connectors now can be configured via the UI. There are still a lot of features though that reuse the old SCC UI bits or simply redirect you to the SCC. Examples include the Edit functionality for DLP policies, Content searches and DSRs, labels and policies, and more. This should come at no surprise, as Microsoft simply continues to follow the “best practice” or releasing a MVP product and taking an year or two to actually bring parity with the functionality available in the old portal. And as discussed previously, the lack of attention to detail is alarming, to a point that it makes you wonder whether someone has actually looked at the live product. Just glance at the Information governance section for example…

The Security center seems to have gotten even less attention than the Compliance center over the last year. The only useful thing here is the new Secure score console. You will find the previous version of the Classification tab, listing the corresponding Retention and Sensitivity labels and policies. Every link under the Policies tab takes you to an external portal, and of course some engineer took the opportunity to shine here as well – the Antispam policy link takes you to the “dogfood” version of the SCC portal (https://df.protection.office.com/antispam).

And that’s pretty much all the Security center currently offers. Not even a hint of functionalities such as the Unified Audit log. Lots of “data isn’t available right now” cards, and eye candy such as the below: