How does the M365 (Office365) add-on integration work?

Saasyan Assure is now able to inspect chat messages (Teams) and emails (Exchange Online) from Microsoft/Office 365. This article explains the connection and integration logic.

By design, the Assure software inspects all messages that are sent and received by the known users (by known user we mean the users that are members of the managed groups in Assure and are synchronised and available in the Assure software) but only saves those that contain words/phrases that match your Words & Phrases dictionary (or the AI engine) into your Alerts log.

  • When an email or chat alert is triggered, it will show up like this in your Alerts notification email:Assure Alerts Email_new
  • You can find them in the Alerts History page like any other alert but to make it easier for you to identify them, you can use the 'Type' column in the report list which will show 'chat' or 'email' depending on the alert (you can search for these keywords to filter for chat messages or email messages only).

    alert_history_1

The software does not however save any messages unless they have triggered an alert.

A message that has triggered an alert is saved in the Alerts module (access to which is controlled by the RBAC [role based access control] engine built into Assure) along with a pointer to the chat or email thread it is part of. This pointer is used to retrieve the email/message thread (context) on demand through the Alerts module. 

It's worth noting that the email/message thread (context) is not saved but is only retrieved directly from Microsoft/Office 365 when the context button is pressed, for you to view within Assure.

  • You will be able to see context for both email and chat messages, allowing you to have a better picture of what was being discussed and the names of students involved in the conversation. 

    M365 Chat Context

    M365 Email Context

It’s not possible to retrieve any other messages from Microsoft/Office 365 through Assure, only chat or email threads that contain a message which has triggered an alert. 

 
  • Assure requires read-only app permissions in order to inspect these messages. 

This is achieved by defining an application in Azure AD and assigning the minimal set of permissions required. Please refer to the MS/O365 add-on configuration guide for further details on how this is done.  

For more info on Saasyan's Security Policy, please refer to our Assure Data Security FAQ article.