FAQ
Questions, answered.
What Presify monitors, how your data is handled, and how it’s different from the things people assume it is.
Privacy
What Presify can see, where data lives, and how long it is kept.
Does Presify read employees’ emails, chats, or files?
No. Presify never reads message content, chats, calls, files, or calendar events. It uses five read-only Microsoft Graph permissions, and nothing more. A Microsoft tenant admin grants this consent once:
- Presence.Read.All (application): reads each monitored user’s Teams presence (Available, Away, Busy, Offline, and the activity behind it). This is the core signal Presify reports on.
- User.Read.All (application): reads basic directory profile (display name, user principal name, account type) to label the people you monitor and to exclude guest accounts.
- Directory.Read.All (application): reads group membership, so you can scope monitoring to a security or distribution group and keep group-based enrollment in sync.
- MailboxSettings.Read (application): reads only each user’s time zone and working hours from their Outlook mailbox settings, so timelines render in their local time and the business-hours overlay is correct. It does not read mailbox content (no email, no calendar), only those two settings.
- User.Read (delegated): lets each authorized person sign in to Presify with their own Microsoft account. It grants no access to anyone else’s data.
Why does Presify request tenant-wide permissions if I only monitor selected users?
Microsoft Graph application permissions are granted at the tenant level. Microsoft provides no way to consent to presence for only a subset of users, so the grant is tenant-wide. A broad grant is not broad access: Presify only ever collects presence for the specific people you enroll, and scope is enforced inside the product, not by the permission itself.
- You choose who is monitored. Presify collects presence only for the users you explicitly enroll (or a group you select). Everyone else in your directory is left out, even though the permission could technically read them.
- Tenant isolation. Every record is scoped to your Microsoft tenant and enforced at the database layer, with cross-tenant access tested in our CI on every change.
- Audit trail. Enrollment and every monitoring change are written to an append-only audit log naming the actor, the action, and the target.
- Least privilege, read-only. The five permissions are read-only and limited to presence plus the directory fields needed to label and scope users. None of them can write to your tenant.
Where is my data stored, and how long is it kept?
Presify runs on US-based cloud infrastructure. Every record is scoped to your tenant and encrypted. Retention depends on your plan, and you can delete a user’s presence history, or your whole account’s data, at any time from Settings.
Setup
Microsoft sign-in, admin consent, and role access.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Presify is built on Microsoft Graph, so there is nothing to deploy to devices. A Microsoft tenant admin grants read-only consent once, and Presify connects to your tenant: no agents, no endpoints.
Do I need an IT admin to set up Presify?
Setup needs a one-time, read-only Microsoft 365 admin consent, so a Microsoft administrator grants access once. After that, an owner or team lead can read the timelines and reports with no technical work. In a small business the owner is often the administrator too, so the same person can do both.
Monitoring
What the presence signal means, how current it is, and how to read flags.
Is this Microsoft Productivity Score?
No. Presify reads Teams presence status through the Microsoft Graph presence API. Microsoft Productivity Score is a separate, restricted feature, and Presify does not use it.
What exactly does Presify monitor?
Teams presence: the availability your team already broadcasts (Available, Away, Busy, Offline) and the activity behind it. Presify keeps that history and turns it into presence timelines, online-time trends, and anomaly flags. Guest accounts are never monitored.
Can Presify tell me if my remote team is actually working?
Presify shows when each person was reachable in Teams (Available, Away, Busy, Offline) over time, not what work they did or whether they were productive. It is a reachability and coverage signal, not a productivity score. We treat presence as evidence for a conversation, not a verdict, and we recommend telling your team their presence is kept.
How current is the data?
Presence is sampled by polling Microsoft Graph on a short, regular interval, so the timeline reflects each user’s status at each sample rather than every momentary change.
What happens if Microsoft is down?
Presify reads presence from Microsoft Graph, so when Microsoft has an outage there is nothing for us to read. You’ll see a clearly marked “No data” gap for that span, never a wrong status. Collection resumes automatically once Microsoft recovers, and you can review your workspace’s Microsoft connection history any time in Settings → Data. Live Microsoft connectivity is also on our status page.
How should I read the anomaly flags?
As a starting point, not a verdict. Anomaly detection is probabilistic: each flag marks a presence pattern that stands out from typical interactive use, shown with the math behind it. Review it alongside other context. Presify describes what it observed, not intent.
Legal and notice
Jurisdiction limits, monitored-user experience, and notice responsibility.
Can I monitor employees in the EU, UK, Switzerland, or Canada?
No, and here is why. Teams presence is personal data, and monitoring it in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, or Canada falls under strict data-protection regimes (the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the Swiss FADP, and Canada’s PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25), each with its own rules for lawful basis, notice, data residency, and data-subject rights.
Presify runs on US-based infrastructure and is built for US workforces. Rather than collect that data without fully meeting those obligations, we exclude it: anyone with an EEA, UK, Switzerland, or Canada work location is automatically left out of monitoring. See the Data Processing Agreement for details.
What do monitored employees see or experience?
Presify reads Teams presence from the Microsoft Graph API on the server side, so it does not install an agent or interrupt anyone: there is no software on their device, no pop-up, and no extra sign-in, and Teams works exactly as it did before. Because Microsoft does not display a user-facing prompt for tenant-admin Graph consent, your team will not see a notification from Presify, so providing any employee notice required by law or policy is your responsibility. We recommend telling your team that their presence is monitored (see the next question and our Terms, Section 6); Presify also includes a ready-to-adapt employee-notice template.
Do I need to tell employees their presence is monitored?
Usually your existing policies already cover it: a line in your employee handbook or acceptable-computer-use policy stating that company systems and activity may be monitored is commonly enough to satisfy notice. Some US states (Connecticut, New York, and Delaware among them) require advance written notice before electronic monitoring begins, and requirements vary by jurisdiction and change over time. We always recommend confirming your obligations with your HR team and your legal counsel. Presify reports Microsoft Teams presence; deciding what notice your organization needs, and giving it, is your responsibility (see our Terms of Service, Section 6).
Billing
Plan and cancellation basics.
Is there a free trial?
Yes. You can start a free 7-day trial during onboarding, with no credit card. A trial monitors only you, the admin who signs in, so you can see exactly how Presify reads your own Teams presence before you roll it out. Upgrade to a paid plan anytime to add your whole team. If you do not upgrade, the trial workspace turns read-only and its data is deleted after a short grace period.
What happens when my free trial ends?
If you upgrade to a paid plan before day 7, nothing breaks: monitoring expands from just you to your whole team and collection keeps running. If you don’t upgrade, the workspace turns read-only on day 7, collection stops, and your data is kept. A 30-day grace period follows, with a deletion countdown shown in the app, during which you can still sign in, view, and export. Upgrade any time before deletion to keep your history and lift the monitor-yourself limit. In the last week of the grace period you’ll get a one-time code for 10% off any plan. If you still haven’t upgraded, the workspace data is deleted at the end of the grace period, and you can delete it sooner from Settings. One free trial is available per Microsoft organization every 12 months.
How do I cancel?
Any time, from Settings → Billing. No email required. Your subscription stays active through the end of the current billing period, after which monitoring stops and data is removed per the retention terms.
Still have a question? We’re glad to help.