Supervision policies


Supervision policies define which communications in your organization need review for compliance, and who will perform those reviews. Use the supervision reports to see the review activity at the policy and reviewer level. For each policy, you can also view live statistics on the current state of review activity. Supervision policies are used to capture employee communications for examination by internal or external reviewers.It uses storage from users mailbox who is reviewing the mails.


You can use the supervision reports to:

  • Verify that your policies are working as you intended.
  • Find out how many emails are being identified for review.
  • Find out how many emails aren't compliant and which ones are passing review. This information can help you decide whether to fine-tune your policies or change the number of reviewers.

Set up a supervision policy

Sign into https://protection.office.com using credentials for an admin account in your Office 365 organization.

  • First you will need to assign permissions for Supervisor Reviewer

           Go to Permissions->select Supervisory Review->Assign to a Admin.


  • Second step is optional as depends if you want to review a user only or more then one.If your looking to review more then one then you will have to create a group and add all the users there.To create a distribution group go into Exchange Admin Center-go to recipients->groups.

           Exchange Admin Center is in Admin Portal->Admin Centers->Exchange

  • Third step would be to create the supervisor policy

            In the Security & Compliance Center, go to click Data governance > Supervision.

            Click Create and then follow the wizard to set up the following pages of the policy.


1.Give a name to the policy

2.Choose the users to supervise or you can choose a group if you created one

3.Leave as it is.Click Next

4.Change to 100% (100% means you are reviewing each and every mail for the users, you can set the value based on how many mails do you want to review every day)

5.Choose who can review

6.Press Finish


How to use the report

When a supervision policy identifies an email for review, the email is delivered to the reviewer’s Supervision folder in Outlook and Outlook web app. This report lists each policy's name and the number of communications at each stage in the review process.

Use the report to:

View data for all or specific policies.

View data grouped by tag type (such as Compliant, Questionable, etc.), reviewer, or message type.

Export data to a CSV file.

Filter data based on review activity date, tag type, reviewer, message type.

Here's a breakdown of the values you might see in the Tag type column.

Tag type
What it means
Not Reviewed
The number of emails that have not been reviewed yet. These emails are awaiting review in the reviewer’s supervision folder in Outlook.
Compliant
The number of emails reviewed and marked as compliant. No further action is needed.
Questionable
The number of emails reviewed and marked questionable. This acts as a flag; other reviewers can help check whether an email needs investigation for compliance.
Non-Compliant (Active)
The number of non-compliant emails that reviewers are currently investigating.
Non-Compliant (Resolved)
The number of non-compliant emails that reviewers investigated and resolved.