MS-102 Manage compliance by using Microsoft Purview Practice Question
A compliance officer needs to prevent users from sharing confidential documents with external users outside the organization. The policy should block sharing via email attachments or sharing links from SharePoint Online. Which Microsoft Purview solution should be configured?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse sensitivity labels (which apply protection) with DLP policies (which enforce actions like blocking), leading them to choose Option A, but labels alone cannot block sharing; they require a DLP policy to enforce the block action.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Microsoft Purview is designed to identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. By creating a DLP policy with a rule that blocks sharing of confidential documents via email attachments or sharing links to external users, the compliance officer can enforce the required restriction. DLP policies can inspect content for sensitive data types (e.g., credit card numbers, custom confidential labels) and apply actions such as blocking the sharing action or sending a notification.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Sensitivity labels
Why it's wrong here
Sensitivity labels categorize and optionally protect content with encryption, but they do not by themselves revoke a user's ability to share files externally. A label can restrict access, yet if a user creates a sharing link, the label alone does not prevent the act of sharing unless additional configuration such as conditional access or a container policy blocks it. Consequently, sensitivity labels provide classification and protection, not a direct sharing-blocking enforcement point.
- ✓
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Why this is correct
DLP policies are the correct technical control because they can identify sensitive information in messages and files and automatically block specific actions such as sending an external email or creating an external sharing link in SharePoint and OneDrive. When a rule is triggered, DLP can block the activity outright, show a policy tip, or require a user to justify an override, giving compliance officers a real-time enforcement mechanism. DLP works across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and endpoints, making it the only option listed that explicitly prevents the sharing of sensitive content.
- ✗
Retention policies
Why it's wrong here
Retention policies govern content lifecycle by preserving items for legal or regulatory requirements and deleting them when the retention period expires, but they never alter user permissions or sharing behavior. A file covered by a retention policy remains fully accessible and shareable for as long as it is retained, because retention settings are administrative metadata about lifecycle, not access control. Therefore, retention policies cannot prevent a user from sharing content with external recipients.
- ✗
Information barriers
Why it's wrong here
Information barriers are scoped segmentation controls that isolate two user groups to stop communication between them, such as separating a sales team from an advisory group to avoid conflicts of interest. They do not provide a universal rule that blocks external sharing, because they inspect the identity of the other participant rather than scanning for sensitive content. External recipients outside the defined segments may still receive shared content, and barriers do not apply any data classification or policy tip logic, so they cannot meet a broad compliance requirement to prevent external sharing.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Microsoft 365 Tenant Setup
Key term
Exchange Online
Exchange Online is Microsoft's cloud-based email, calendar, and contact hosting service that is part of the Microsoft 365 suite, allowing organizations to manage corporate messaging without maintaining their own mail servers.
Key term
Policy
A policy is a set of rules or guidelines that defines how an organization manages, secures, and operates its IT systems and services.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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