SkieWhat is the effective policy view and why use it?
The effective policy view shows the final rules a group or device is actually following after every level has been applied: organisation, school, branch and group. It is the answer to 'why does this tablet behave like this?', and it saves you reading each level's settings and working out the result by hand.
Rules in Skie flow down the structure. An organisation can set defaults, a school can refine them, a branch can refine further, and the group's own policy and app list apply last. The most specific level wins where levels disagree, with one exception covered in the blocking rule: blocking beats allowing.
That layering is convenient but it makes a question hard: given all these levels, what does this particular tablet do? The effective policy view merges them for you. You pick a group or a device and read the end result, including which apps are allowed, which switches are on and which filter applies.
It is the first place to look when a teacher says an app is missing, or a student says something should work and does not. Often the answer is a block set at a higher level that the group's own list cannot override. The view shows that directly, so you fix the right level instead of editing the group in vain.
A practical tip: after any change to defaults, open the effective view for one device in each kind of group as a quick spot check. Pair it with the compliance score, which shows whether the device has actually applied those rules, since the device reads each protection back from Android after every apply.