Microsoft Purview From Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Getting Started with Compliance

What Is Microsoft Purview and Why Does It Matter?

Compliance is no longer just a legal checkbox — it is a strategic business priority. Whether you are a small organization handling sensitive customer data or a global enterprise navigating complex regulatory frameworks, understanding how to protect, govern, and manage your information is essential. Microsoft Purview is Microsoft's unified platform for data governance, risk management, and compliance, and it sits at the heart of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It replaces the older Microsoft 365 Compliance Center and Azure Purview under a single, consolidated brand, bringing together tools that help organizations understand where their data lives, who has access to it, and how it is being used or shared.

For organizations that are just beginning their compliance journey, Purview can feel overwhelming at first glance. There are dozens of features, policies, and configurations to explore. But the good news is that you do not have to configure everything at once. This article is designed to walk you through the platform in a structured, approachable way — starting from the very beginning and building up your understanding piece by piece.

Understanding the Microsoft Purview Portal and Licensing

Before you can configure anything, you need to know where to go and what you have access to. The Microsoft Purview compliance portal is accessible at

https://purview.microsoft.com/

and it is here that you will spend most of your time as a compliance administrator. The portal is organized into several key solution areas including Information Protection, Data Lifecycle Management, eDiscovery, Insider Risk Management, and more.

Licensing is a critical consideration before you begin. Not every feature in Purview is available on every Microsoft 365 subscription. Many of the advanced compliance capabilities — such as Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, and Advanced eDiscovery — require Microsoft 365 E5 or the Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance add-on. Core features like Sensitivity Labels and basic Data Loss Prevention policies are available starting with Microsoft 365 E3. It is strongly recommended to review the Microsoft 365 Compliance licensing documentation

before planning your rollout, so you align your compliance goals with the features your license actually supports.

Step One: Setting Up Your Compliance Roles and Permissions

The very first practical step in any Purview deployment is making sure the right people have the right access. Microsoft Purview uses role-based access control (RBAC) through role groups defined within the compliance portal itself, separate from the standard Azure Active Directory admin roles. This distinction matters because a Global Administrator in Microsoft 365 does not automatically have access to all compliance features — they need to be explicitly assigned to a compliance role group.

The most commonly assigned role groups for getting started are Compliance Administrator, which grants broad access to manage compliance features, and Compliance Data Administrator, which is suited for users who need to view and configure data governance settings. You can assign users to these role groups by navigating to Permissions within the Purview portal and selecting the appropriate group. For organizations just getting started, it is a best practice to assign at least two compliance administrators to ensure redundancy, and to avoid using a Global Administrator account for day-to-day compliance operations. This separation of duties is itself a compliance best practice that auditors look for.

Step Two: Configuring Sensitivity Labels for Information Protection

Sensitivity Labels are arguably the most impactful feature to configure early in your Purview journey. They allow you to classify and protect content — such as emails, documents, and meetings — by applying a label that can enforce encryption, content markings, and access restrictions. Labels travel with the content, meaning a document marked as "Confidential" carries that label and its protections wherever it goes, whether inside or outside your organization.

To get started with Sensitivity Labels, navigate to Information Protection in the Purview portal and select Labels. From here you will create your label taxonomy — a structured hierarchy of labels that reflects how your organization thinks about its data. A common starting structure looks like this:

- Public — Information approved for unrestricted external sharing

- Internal — General internal business content

- Confidential — Sensitive business data with limited sharing

- Highly Confidential — Regulated or highly sensitive data, encrypted by default

Once your labels are created, you publish them via Label Policies, which control which users and groups see which labels. Keep your initial label structure simple. Many organizations make the mistake of creating too many labels at once, which leads to user confusion and low adoption. Start with four to six labels, validate them with stakeholders, and expand over time.

Step Three: Enabling Data Loss Prevention Policies

Once your Sensitivity Labels are in place, the natural next step is to configure Data Loss Prevention, commonly referred to as DLP. DLP policies help prevent the accidental or intentional sharing of sensitive information — such as credit card numbers, national ID numbers, or health records — outside of your organization. Microsoft Purview includes a library of over 200 built-in sensitive information types (SITs) that can detect patterns in content, making it relatively easy to get started without building everything from scratch.

DLP policies are configured under the Data Loss Prevention section of the Purview portal. When creating a policy, you choose the locations it applies to — which can include Exchange email, SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, Teams chats, and even endpoint devices if you have onboarded them. You then define conditions (what triggers the policy) and actions (what happens when a match is found), such as blocking the sharing of content, sending a notification to the user, or alerting the compliance team.

For organizations new to DLP, it is strongly recommended to start every policy in simulation mode (also called "test mode") before enforcing it. Simulation mode allows the policy to run and log matches without actually blocking or notifying users, giving you valuable insight into what the policy would do in production without causing disruption. Review the simulation results over a period of one to two weeks, refine your conditions as needed, and only then switch the policy to active enforcement.

Step Four: Getting Started with Data Lifecycle Management

Data Lifecycle Management (DLM), formerly known as Information Governance, is about ensuring that data is retained for as long as it is needed — and disposed of when it is not. This is essential for regulatory compliance, legal hold requirements, and simply keeping your Microsoft 365 environment clean and manageable. Microsoft Purview handles this through Retention Policies and Retention Labels.

Retention Policies apply broadly across locations — for example, keeping all Exchange emails for seven years or deleting all Teams chat messages after three years. Retention Labels, on the other hand, offer more granular control and can be applied manually by users or automatically by the system based on content type, sensitive information, or Sensitivity Label. Labels also support Records Management, where certain content can be declared an immutable record, preventing it from being modified or deleted before the end of its retention period.

When planning your retention configuration, always start with a conversation with your legal and compliance team to understand your organization's specific regulatory obligations. Different industries have very different retention requirements — a healthcare organization is bound by HIPAA, a financial services firm by FINRA, and a public sector body by its own national archiving laws. Purview's retention features are flexible enough to address most of these, but the policy design must come from your business requirements, not the other way around.

Step Five: Exploring eDiscovery and Audit Capabilities

Even at the beginning of your compliance journey, it is worth understanding what eDiscovery and Audit capabilities are available to you, even if you are not yet using them actively. eDiscovery in Microsoft Purview allows you to search across Microsoft 365 services — including Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams — to find content relevant to legal investigations, regulatory inquiries, or internal HR matters. The standard version, eDiscovery (Standard), is available to most organizations and supports case creation, content searches, and export. The premium version, eDiscovery (Premium), adds advanced analytics, custodian management, and review sets for large-scale legal matters.

The Audit solution is equally important and should be activated early. Microsoft Purview Audit logs user and administrator activity across Microsoft 365 services and retains those logs for 90 days by default (with up to one year for E3 licenses and up to ten years for E5). Enabling audit logging early means you will have historical data available if an incident or investigation occurs later. To enable it, navigate to Audit in the Purview portal and confirm that auditing is turned on for your tenant. This is a simple step that can have significant implications for your organization's ability to respond to incidents.

Building a Compliance Roadmap: What Comes Next

Getting started with Microsoft Purview is less about configuring every feature immediately and more about building a sustainable, prioritized roadmap. The features covered in this article — roles and permissions, Sensitivity Labels, DLP, Data Lifecycle Management, and Audit — represent a solid foundation that gives your organization real protection and visibility from day one. From here, you can expand into more advanced capabilities such as Insider Risk Management, Communication Compliance, Information Barriers, and Microsoft Purview's integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot for AI governance.

The most successful compliance programs treat Purview not as a one-time project but as an ongoing operational practice. Labels need to be reviewed as business processes evolve. DLP policies need to be tuned as new data types emerge. Retention schedules need to be updated as regulations change. Assigning a dedicated compliance owner or team, conducting regular policy reviews, and keeping up with Microsoft's release notes for Purview updates are all habits that separate organizations that are merely compliant from those that are genuinely well-governed. Starting small, being consistent, and iterating over time is the path forward.

Source: Microsoft Purview From Scratch: A Beginner's Guide to Getting Started with Compliance