Policy Enforcer puts every Policy breach it has ever detected in one place, and lets you clear each one without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Violations reach you two ways. The Policy Enforcer bot sends whoever you nominated an Adaptive Card the moment something needs attention, and everything is also listed under the Violations tab whenever you want the full picture.

💡If nothing is appearing here at all, check that you have an active Enforcement in place. Policy Enforcer only watches Spaces covered by a Policy you've chosen to enforce.

The Violations tab splits into Pending and Resolved, each with a count so you can see at a glance whether anything is waiting on you.

Every row shows the Space, the Violation type, the Resolution group responsible, and when the violation happened. Resolved rows add the resolution date and what was done about it.

A Pending violation that has been sitting for a while shows as Due, with how many days it has been open. The Resolution column records the outcome in plain terms: Reverted, New value accepted, Re-added, Added, Dismissed, or Expired.

Search covers both subtabs at once. If you search in Pending and the match is actually in Resolved, Policy Enforcer tells you and links straight to it rather than leaving you to guess.

You can also arrive here filtered to a single Space, with a banner telling you which one and offering to show everything again.

A note on naming. The Violations list and the Configure enforcement screen label some types differently. Display name changed in the list is the same as Naming convention breached when you configure it, Owner removed is the 2-owner policy type, and Planner title changed and OneNote name changed are the two rename types. They refer to identical violations.

Clicking any Pending row opens the Violation Review Dialog, the same thing your reviewers get when they open a card in Teams.

The dialog leads with what happened: the property that changed, its previous value, its new value, and who made the change.

Each resolution option states exactly what it will do. You'll see Revert to private or Set the space visibility back to private rather than a vague "revert the change", so there's no guessing about what you're applying.

Pick an option, confirm, and Policy Enforcer applies it and moves the violation to Resolved.

Occasionally re-applying isn't offered. When the compliant value can't be determined automatically, the dialog says so and dismissing becomes your only option. That's expected, not broken, and usually means something the Naming Convention depends on isn't available.

For the three types that involve owners and members, the dialog gives you a people picker to put the Space right.

You can re-add whoever was removed, or pick somebody else from your directory. If the person who was removed has since been deleted from your tenant, they still appear but greyed out, with a note that they can't be re-added.

💡Choosing somebody who isn't currently in the Team adds them to it. That's how the resolution gets applied, so give it a moment's thought before you confirm.

Dismissing means deciding the change is acceptable and leaving it in place. The Space stays as it is and the violation moves to Resolved marked Dismissed.

Dismissal sits alongside the other options in the dialog, so it's a deliberate choice rather than an escape hatch.

Two things happen when you dismiss. A Team Owner has to give a reason first, and your IT department is informed either way.

A Team deliberately made public for a client-facing project is a reasonable dismissal. Recording why means the next person reviewing that Space understands the decision.

Anything in Resolved opens read-only. You can see exactly what happened and what was done, but there are no actions available.

A violation can also close on its own. If a second change of the same type hits the same Space while the first is still Pending, the older one becomes Expired and the newer one takes its place. If a reviewer opens a card and finds it already closed, this is almost always why.

If a reviewer loses access to a Space partway through, they're told the violation couldn't be resolved and that it stays open for other reviewers, so nothing gets stuck behind one person.

Now that you can work through violations, it's time to check whether your governance is improving.

We recommend starting here:

Get further assistance with Policy Enforcer through our support chat widget within the app, or reach out to us at [email protected]