All the ways to automatically apply a retention label in Office 365

Joanne Klein

4 years ago

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Do you want to apply retention labels across your Office 365 tenant, but you’re concerned about relying on end-users to manually apply them? If you do, you’re not alone. Nothing against end-users, but they have other things to focus on… retention isn’t one of them.

Here are the current ways to automatically apply a retention label and a use-case for each one. The options available are license-dependent (shown after the options), however please weigh the license cost against the cost of non-compliance. At the end of the post, I have links to my Ignite video and presentation for more details and a step-by-step walk-thru of each option.

Automatically apply at a document library level
- Approved Budgets document library
Automatically apply at a folder or document set level
- Financial Services Fiscal month folders
Auto-apply based on a sensitive information type
- Custom sensitive information type for customer # content
Auto-apply based on a keyword query
- Executive team sites
Auto-apply based on a content type
- Project documents across all Project Sites
Auto-apply based on a metadata value
- Expired Corporate Policies
Automatically set using Power Automate
- Custom logic: Approved Budgets over $20K
Auto-apply using Trainable Classifiers (Preview)
- Machine learning used to intelligently classify your unstructured data at scale

[Update December 6, 2019] To clarify, it is also possible to set a retention label programmatically using a REST API call, CSOM and Powershell. This was not mentioned because the intended audience for this post was power users and not developers. Please refer to a great post by Martin Lingstuyl for a deep-dive on doing this thru code: Managing and applying Purview retention labels using code

[UPDATED November 12, 2020] In addition to the techniques described in this post and on the Ignite 2019 video linked to below, please refer to another post of mine, SharePoint Syntex. First Steps with Intelligent Content Types and Compliance as an additional feature available to automatically apply retention labels.