Purview Adaptive Scopes Ease Policy Management

• Purview adaptive scopes use queries to define a collection of users, groups, and SharePoint sites that should be included within a retention policy or a communication compliance policy.
• Adaptive scopes enable complex membership within policies without requiring manual manipulation or updating of groups directly.
• While these policies resemble Entra ID dynamic membership for groups, there are significant differences between the two: Purview doesn’t understand dynamic membership.

Purview adaptive scopes allow compliance administrators to define the users, groups, and sites included in a retention policy or communication compliance policy automatically. Although there is a learning curve for adaptive scopes, administrators are likely to find them to be more powerful and flexible than manually defining the parts of the organization that are included in each policy. Adaptive scopes offer similar benefits to Entra ID groups and administrative units with dynamic membership. In particular, not requiring regular upkeep to add or remove users manually or using scripts should help administrators ensure that policies remain constantly applicable to the right entities automatically. Organizations that have not fully licensed Microsoft 365 E5 should avoid using adaptive scopes because they aren’t entitled to it and the feature won’t include unlicensed users in resultant policies.