Have you heard about Adaptive Scopes? It’s a new Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management feature. I’m really excited about this feature because I think it addresses many of the challenging retention scenarios I see with customers looking to apply retention controls at scale across their tenant.
This collection of posts is based on my experience with the feature.
Adaptive scopes will help organizations gain compliance across their environment in a flexible, scalable, automated, and targeted way. Click To TweetMicrosoft’s recent webinar provides walk-thru demos of the new Adaptive Scope feature for several common use-case scenarios. I’d encourage you to check it out: mipc.eventbuilder.com/event/45703
A few key things about adaptive scopes to understand:
- They are scopes, not policies
- They can be used in both retention policies and retention label policies
- There will now be 2 types of scopes:
- Static (what we’ve had and used up until now)
- Adaptive (new)
- There are 3 types of adaptive scopes:
- User | based on Azure AD attributes
- Site | based on SharePoint site properties
- Microsoft 365 Group | based on Azure AD attributes
What is a scope? A scope comes into play when you publish your retention or label policy. Up to this point in time, scopes have been static and to adjust the locations included/excluded in either a retention or label policy, it was up to you to control that – either manually or automated with custom code/script. There are, however, limits for the number of inclusions/exclusions allowed and the added challenge of ensuring the list is accurate and up-to-date making this a non-trivial task. Adaptive scopes help address this challenge.
An adaptive scope is different than a static scope in that it can determine what should be included/excluded based on conditions you specify. The conditions are dependent on the type of adaptive scope you configure: they can be a User’s Azure AD attributes, SharePoint site properties, or Microsoft 365 Groups Azure AD attributes.
Once you’ve provided the condition(s) for inclusion/exclusion and included it in a policy, the policy will automatically update and adjust to match the user(s), SharePoint site(s), or Microsoft 365 Group(s) to be included in the scope without further intervention from you. Awesome! 🙂
I believe Adaptive Scopes will help address many of the challenging retention requirements I see while working with customers. For these posts, I’ve intentionally chosen the use-case examples as they’re all real scenarios I’ve been asked to build by customers (and they also span industry and geography) and ALL of them can be addressed by using Adaptive scopes:
Post 1
- The Retention Ask: “Automatically include project SharePoint sites in a retention policy when the project is complete without having to manually include the SharePoint site URL in the policy. No disposition review is required on the content.”
- Policy type: Retention Policy
- Adaptive scope type: SharePoint
- Link: SharePoint Adaptive Scope Retention Policy | A Walk-thru
Post 2:
- The Retention Ask: “Automatically apply a retention label to Legal Matter SharePoint site content once the matter is concluded without having to manually apply the labels to the content. A disposition review is required on the content.”
- Policy type: Retention Label Policy (auto-apply)
- Adaptive scope type: SharePoint
- Link: SharePoint Adaptive Scope Retention Label Policy | A Walk-thru
Post 3:
- The Retention Ask: “Automatically apply a retention label to all Executives’ emails and OneDrive files while they’re in an executive role without having to manually include/exclude every Executive as they move in and out of that role. A disposition review is required for the content.”
- Policy type: Retention Label Policy (auto-apply)
- Adaptive scope type: User
- Link: User Adaptive Scope and Auto-apply Retention Label Policy Walk-thru
Post 4:
- The Retention Ask: “Automatically apply a retention policy to all sites with a site template of ‘x'”
- Adaptive scope type: SharePoint
- Link: Adaptive Policy Scopes targeting SharePoint site templates
Post 5:
- The Retention Ask: “Automatically apply a 5 year retention policy to all Microsoft 365 Groups provisioned for the EU region; whereas apply a 10 year retention policy if they’re provisioned for the APAC region.”
- Policy type: Retention Policy
- Adaptive scope type: Group
- Link: Coming soon…
Note: I’ll add more posts over time and link to them here.
Closing thoughts…
I see tremendous value in this model to scope retention in a flexible, scalable, automated, and targeted way. Check back on this post to see more examples over time as I continue to work with customers implementing retention controls across Microsoft 365.
Thanks for reading.
-JCK