One of the main features of SharePoint and OneDrive lists and libraries is versioning. Five hundred major versions are retained by default with versioning; however, this can be expanded. In the scenario where content has versioning enabled and retention settings are set to keep content, the versions that are moved to the Preservation Hold library are stored as individual elements.

If you have a case where the retention period is built on when the data is created, every version will have the same expiry date as the original data, therefore all will have the same expiry date.

If you have a scenario in which the retention period is built on when the data was last edited, all versions have their own expiry date, which is dependent on when the original data was edited to create that specific version. This means that the original data and its versions expire at different times.

Configuring a retention policy for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

The following lab exercise will walk through the steps to create and configure a retention policy for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business:

  1. Log in to the Microsoft 365 Compliance portal at https://compliance.microsoft.com with an Administrator account that has Global Administrator privileges.
  2. Navigate to Policies > Retention policies and click on New retention policy:

Figure 11.2 – Navigate to New retention policy

3. On the Name page, give the policy a sensible name and description and then click on Next.

4. On the Locations page, select SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts. Depending on your use case, you may want to select only one of these or both. Click Next:

Figure 11.3 – Locations to apply the policy

5. On the Retention settings page, you can configure the following:

a. Retain items for a specific period, which can be 5, 7, or 10 years. You can then customize this setting if you want to be more granular and select a certain number of months and days as well.

b. Start the retention based on either when the item was created, or when the item was last modified.

Click on Next once you are finished configuring your retention settings:

Figure 11.4 – Retention settings

6. Review the policy and click Submit.

We have now covered all aspects of creating and applying retention policies in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. In the following section, we will move on to creating and applying retention policies in Microsoft Teams.

Creating and applying retention policies in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams stores data throughout the various Microsoft 365 services and Azure ecosystem. This means that the behavior of the retention policies depends on the type of data you wish to keep or delete.

Data can be kept or deleted by utilizing retention policies for Microsoft Teams. Single chat and channel messages, including embedded images, links, and tables as well as links to other messages and files can all be included as part of the policy. With individual chat messages, it includes all names of the users within the chat, and with channels it includes the team’s name and the title of the message. Private channel Teams messages are not included, nor are emoticons.

Any document or emails that are utilized with Microsoft Teams are not included in retention policies. This content needs a different retention policy that has Exchange locations configured to protect group mailboxes.

Chats and channels are kept when a retention policy has Teams as a location, which is consumed from the Azure Cosmos DB storage location into a concealed folder in the group mailbox.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *