Microsoft 365 retention management extends beyond records management. A key aspect of effective records compliance is in managing retention and disposition of ALL information without adding additional burden on your business / IT users. In this video blog, you will learn the best practice to enable an enterprise policy to delete information in Onedrive for Business (ODB) user accounts, and Exchange Online (EXO) mailboxes (including user and shared mailboxes.

Why One Drive for Business and Exchange Online?

Most organizations promote ODB and EXO mailboxes are private/personal workspaces where only the user associated with the account has access to manage information and its lifecycle. These two locations are also the places also subject to litigation, Freedom of Information (FOI) and Subject Access Request (SAR) happen due to increased compliance risk.

It is difficult and often not practical to expect enterprise users to manage the responsibility of identifying information compliance risks against several regulations. Enterprise policies provide an automated mechanism to build the intelligence in the system and transition towards a ‘compliance by design principle.

What are the Benefits of Enterprise Retention Policy?

• Enterprise policies are infinitely scalable to enterprise-scale

• Joiner and Leaver scenarios are automatically addressed by enterprise policies

• Automatically detect sensitive information or other information types as a trigger to delete information

• No user intervention required, users can continue to work with the information as normal

Retention Label or Retention Policy?

Use Retention Labels when:

• Information within the same location requires different classifications to drive lifecycle

• Information is required to be managed as a record or a regulatory record

• Information requires manual classification by users or auto-classification using Keywords, metadata or machine learning

Use Retention Policies when:

• A single baseline retention period is applicable to all information with a location (ODB, EXO etc.)

• Joiner / Leaver scenarios are required to be automatically managed

• No user intervention is expected or required with the baseline policy

Finally, Enterprise retention policies are also a great way to drive good Information governance and user behavior. Many organizations have moved towards a standard best practice of implementing a baseline retention policy in all private/personal spaces and enable long-term retention labeling in shared spaces (SharePoint, Teams etc.).

Find out more about customer success stories, lessons learned, and Book a demo with us to ‘see in action’ all the key Microsoft knowledge and governance features at work.