Compliance Manager, Explorers and Content Search

What it is

These four tools are all in the Microsoft Purview portal, and each answers a different question. The exam gives you a question and asks which tool fits.

How it works

Compliance Manager

Compliance Manager helps you assess and manage compliance against regulations and standards. Its parts are easy to learn as a short list.

• Regulations are templates, for example a data protection law or an ISO standard.
• Assessments group the controls from a regulation or standard.
• Controls are the requirements. Some are managed by Microsoft, some by you, and some are shared.
• Improvement actions are the recommended tasks. You can assign them to people, store evidence and track status.
• Compliance score is a risk based measure of progress. It rises as improvement actions are completed.

To identify compliance risks, open Compliance Manager, look at the score and the assessments, then work through the improvement actions with the greatest impact. The recommendations are the improvement actions.

Data explorer and Content explorer

To find sensitive information, you look at which items match sensitive information types, carry sensitivity labels or carry retention labels. In the Purview portal this is done with the data explorer views. Content explorer is the classic item level view: it lists items by label or sensitive information type, and lets you drill down by location such as Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. Microsoft changes the names of these explorer views from time to time. Remember the purpose: what sensitive items do we have, and where?

Viewing the content of items needs extra permission, because the tool can show the text of files. Counts can take days to refresh, so recent changes may not appear at once.

Activity explorer

Activity explorer shows actions taken on content that has a sensitivity label or matches a sensitive information type. Examples are a label applied, changed or removed, a file copied to removable media, or a file shared. It also appears inside DSPM for AI, where it shows AI interactions.

Content search in eDiscovery

Content search lets you search for emails and files across Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive and Teams. You write a query with keywords and conditions, choose locations, run the search, preview results, then export them. It is the simplest part of eDiscovery. Stored Copilot prompts and responses can be found with Content search as well.

Content search finds and exports. Case management with holds and review sets belongs to the fuller eDiscovery tools, which are beyond this exam.

A worked example

A compliance officer needs to prepare for an audit. She opens Compliance Manager, sees a low score for a regulation and assigns the top improvement actions. She uses the explorers to find which SharePoint sites hold unlabeled files with credit card numbers. Activity explorer shows who copied labeled files to USB drives last week. Legal then asks for every email between two people about a project, so she runs a Content search and exports the results.

How the exam asks about this

• "Which tool recommends actions to improve compliance with a regulation and gives a score?" Compliance Manager.
• "See what actions users took on labeled files over time." Activity explorer.
• "Find all emails containing a project code name across mailboxes." Content search.