Day: June 5, 2026

James Serra provides some recommendations:

Microsoft Purview can be the best data governance tool in the world, but it will still be useless if people do not know it exists, do not trust the metadata, or do not change the way they work. That is the part that often gets missed. We sometimes think that buying or implementing a governance tool means governance is now “done.” I wish it worked that way. I really do. But the reality is that Purview can automate a lot, but it cannot magically fix missing metadata, undocumented business definitions, manual data movement, duplicate datasets, or people who keep building new reports without first checking whether the data already exists.

This blog is about best practices for Microsoft Purview data governance, not the data security and compliance side of Purview. I covered the broader value of Purview data governance in my post, Microsoft Purview: The key benefits of data governance, but here I want to get more practical and a bit more opinionated. Microsoft Purview has many capabilities across governance, risk, compliance, and security, but this post focuses on the governance experience: cataloging data, improving metadata, helping users find trusted data, understanding lineage, organizing data products, and making data easier to use. Microsoft also has helpful guidance, including data governance planning, Unified Catalog planning, Purview deployment best practices, deployment checklist, and getting started but the real lesson is this: the tool is only as good as the operating model around it.

Pricing jokes aside, Purview is a very powerful products and there’s a lot of sound advice from James in this post.