Microsoft 365 compliance center: Unified compliance administration for all customers

Early last year, we launched the Microsoft 365 compliance center for Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 customers. Since then we’ve been hard at work making it a unified and comprehensive compliance administration console for all our customers. Today, we are excited to announce that we’ve shipped several new enhancements to the portal, and are making it available to all customers with Microsoft 365, Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and Windows 10 Enterprise plans.

In this release we’ve focused on three areas: integrated management, easier on-boarding, and improved controls.

Integrated management

Microsoft 365 compliance center is now truly a one-stop compliance destination. We’ve converged disparate admin experiences into one console, and we’ve built integrations with third-party data as well, giving you a single pane of glass to manage your entire compliance posture

1. Converged console

Microsoft 365 compliance center is now truly a single destination to manage your compliance posture. Admins no longer need to go to the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center for compliance administration. Existing compliance capabilities within the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center are now available in the Microsoft 365 compliance center. Any data and policies authored in the Office 365 portal will automatically carry over to the Microsoft 365 one, since they share the same data back-end.

Additionally, we’ve introduced several exciting features and capabilities on the Microsoft 365 compliance center. Some of them are highlighted in this post, but you can see the full list here.

While you can choose to continue using Office 365 Security & Compliance Center by visiting protection.office.com, we encourage you to move your admin experience to the Microsoft 365 compliance center, since all the new capabilities will be available only in the new center.

2. Data connectors

You can now easily import and archive your business data from third-party social media platforms, instant messaging platforms, and document collaboration platforms. After this data is imported, you can apply Microsoft 365 compliance features—such as Litigation Hold, eDiscovery, In-Place Archiving, Auditing, Communication compliance, and retention policies—to this data. Examples of supported sources are Bloomberg, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Learn more

Easier onboarding

A recurring theme of feedback from you, our customers, has been that compliance is complex and it’s hard to get started. We looked at ways to make this easier and have introduced three key capabilities towards this goal.

1. Microsoft Compliance Score helps you simplify compliance and reduce risks and gives you simple, actionable recommendations to improve your compliance posture.
2. Solution catalog: We’ve organized our compliance capabilities into integrated solutions that help you manage an end-to-end compliance scenario. A solution's capabilities might include a combination of policies, alerts, reports, end-user facing experiences, and more. The solution catalog is your one-stop-shop for discovering, learning about, and quickly getting started with our compliance and risk management solutions. It provides information about the benefits and target use cases for a solution, and how to get started with it. Solutions in the catalog are organized into three compliance categories: Information protection & governance, Insider risk management, and Discovery & response.3. Insights: To make it easier to get started with compliance, we’ve provided out-of-the-box insights into the sensitive data across various locations in your organization: Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and endpoints. You can easily determine the right retention and DLP policies to apply based on these insights. This feature is in limited preview.

Improved administrative controls

We've invested in more administrative flexibility by adding new roles and enabling more customizable experiences. 

1. Support for new roles

We’ve added support for the much-requested Global Reader and Compliance Data Admin roles. Learn more about these roles. These new roles allow you to delegate administration tasks and reduce the number of Global administrators in your directory.

The Global Reader role can view everything a Global administrator can view without the ability to edit or change. The Compliance Data Admin role can create and manage compliance data policies and alerts.

2. Customizable experience

Every admin has different priorities when it comes to compliance. The Microsoft 365 compliance center allows you to customize your experience to suit your needs. You can customize the homepage dashboard by selecting from a catalog of cards.

You can also customize the left navigation bar by selecting and pinning the solutions that you use most frequently.

If you’re ready to try the new center out, be sure to visit the Microsoft 365 compliance center at compliance.microsoft.com today. You can learn more about the new center in this supporting documentation.