Microsoft Teams: Information Barriers

Series: MS-700

Series Description: This series contains my notes from studying for the MS-700 Microsoft certification exam, about administering Teams You can navigate other posts in the series using the list of links in the sidebar.

What if you need to partition your organization so that some members of your tenant cannot communicate with others in Teams? For example, maybe you have interns who you do want to have Teams access but not to any sensitive information.

Information barriers are the solution you need. You can block interaction across the barriers so that the interns cannot see any content from anybody else or vice versa.

Creating the barriers is done by PowerShell. There is not currently a web admin interface to do it.

Create one organization segment for interns:

New-OrganizationSegment -Name "Interns" -UserGroupFilter "Title -contains 'Intern'"

Repeat for another segment called staff:

New-OrganizationSegment -Name "Staff" -UserGroupFilter "Title -not (-contains 'Intern')"

Now that you have the two segments, create the barrier between them:

New-InformationBarrierPolicy -Name "Interns" -AssignedSegment "Interns" -SegmentsBlocked "Staff" -State Inactive

Finally, apply the information barriers:

Start-InformationBarrierPoliciesApplication

It could take several hours to go into effect.