If you are a Microsoft 365 E5 subscriber, then you will have Microsoft Purview Records Management features available to you. Records Management allows you to effectively manage the lifecycle of document content in your tenant. This can be important for compliance reasons, but you may also have business needs that records management can address.
In this video, I demonstrate how to create a new File Plan, configure the various options and send a document for disposition review at the end of retention period.
File Plans allow you to create plans to classify content by Business Function, Category, Sub-Category and then apply specific retention rules. This means you can set retention specific to meet specific requirements, for example, retain financial records for 7 years, contracts for duration of the contract, HR records for event based timeframes etc.
In the demo I use a lable that is applied to a static / defined location. You can also create Adaptive Scopes for more complex rules.
Adaptive Scopes allow you to specific the full or partial Site URL or Name e.g., all sites starting with PROJ could match for all project sites. You can also specify a refinable string, or create an advanced query using KQL.
Once implemented, disposition notifications are sent by email to the assigned email address and can also be seen in the Purview Records Management area.
For each File Plan, you can view files ready for disposition and decided what to do next, delete, assign a different label, send to another person for review and download.
A few things to consider:
- Naming convention for File Plans, Labels and Adaptive Scopes
- Email addresses for disposition, especially if you have very long retention periods
- Compliance roles and responsibilities
- The compliance obligations your organisation has
When you create a Label it does not become available instantly. Timer jobs run in the background to provision the labels and currently it can take up to 7 days. This can make testing slow and you should factor this into your roll out planning.
Purview Records Management features are a welcome addition to the tools we have available for information management.
To learn more about Records Management:
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