Scope questions on your dashboard: what ECP asks and what you do

Who sees the questions?

Only people who may change the scope: owners, administrators and members who may manage the register. Questions labelled Urgent come first. Each question names the control it counts for.

The questions, and what you do

• Set an end date. An exception has no end date, often an older one. The button opens the control. Under What applies per security group, click Change the lines, pick a day under Does not apply until and click Save lines.
• Choose the group. "Choose which group your employees are". Without that choice ECP does not know who your employees are, and training and read confirmations do not count yet. Pick the Microsoft 365 group that holds all your people and click Save.
• Open the group. A group is empty: "Nothing in scope for ...". Empty is never in order. Check the register to see whether the items are there. If it really is empty, mark the control as not applicable, with a reason.
• Open the connection (Urgent). A connection also sees things from outside your organisation, for example another client's laptops. On IT environment, Integrations tab, that connection says "At the vendor, limit what ... reads to ...". An exclusion rule does not fix this, because the evidence stays mixed. At the vendor, choose which environment (the tenant) or organisation the connection may read, then reconnect or sync again. Your IT partner often does this. Until then, that connection's evidence does not count.
• Review the items. A connection sees items that are not in scope. "Does this belong here?" Include them, or exclude them with a reason. After 14 days without a decision the control fails.

"Being updated"

After a large change ECP works out your scope again, in pieces. While that runs, the Applies to line on a control, Show for on Audit and a connection's card show Being updated instead of a verdict. That way you do not act on a verdict that is still changing. The Applies to line on a risk and "in scope via" in the register keep their numbers, with the sentence "Being updated: these numbers may still change." The block on your dashboard says "The scope questions are being updated".

You do not need to do anything. If something new just came in, you see "Something new came in; the numbers will be updated shortly."

Does the update fail for a day, or three times in a row? Then the screens show the last verdicts again, with "Not final: the figures could not be fully updated. We try again automatically." The scope questions stay on your dashboard as usual.