On March 27, SharePoint history reached its 23rd year. That’s a great achievement and SharePoint Online powers many apps. But dark clouds are on the horizon as information governance becomes a real issue for Microsoft 365 tenants. Too much information that is never cleared out is held in SharePoint, a fact revealed by the ability of Copilot to find and consume documents.
Microsoft 365 retention policies allow organizations to keep or remove content from workloads like Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. You can apply filters in retention policies, but Microsoft only supports this capability auto-label retention policies. You can go ahead and update a standard retention policy to add a content filter with PowerShell and the policy will work. The question is, how long will it work for before Microsoft changes something on the backend to stop the policy working?
Auto-label retention policies find items in Microsoft 365 locations and apply retention labels to those items. In this article, we explain the steps involved in creating an auto-label retention policy to look for items with sensitivity labels and apply retention labels to those items.
Microsoft 365 retention policies control how the system removes items automatically from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, and other locations. Because these policies are so powerful, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on who makes changes to their settings. The audit log is a natural place to go looking for information about policy updates and while we can find information there, some of the data is oddly formatted or obscured for some reason. Persistence and PowerShell delivers answers, but this is a task way harder than it should be.
Office 365 tenants will soon be able to create adaptive scopes for retention policies. An adaptive scope is nothing more than a filter to select target mailboxes, sites, and Microsoft 365 groups based on some criteria. They’re adaptive because administrators don’t have to update policies as they add new objects. Like other Microsoft 365 Information Governance features which automate some aspect of operations, adaptive scopes are likely to demand Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance licenses.