[New!] This is a partner post to “Daisy-chaining retention labels and automated archival” by Martin Lingstuyl. The intent for associating our 2 posts is to allow us to each bring our own expertise to bear on complex retention requirements we see from our own customers. This post talks about the daisy-chain retention label functional design pattern for Archival and Martin’s post supplements it by discussing how to help automate for scale. We hope you can benefit from our collective experiences and approach.
I’ve previously blogged about how to use a Power Automate flow at the end of a retention period to archive a single record to an internal archive site (Building a Records Archive Center in SharePoint). This is a good model for moving records 1 at a time; however, what if you have hundreds or thousands of records to move and you don’t want to execute hundreds or thousands of Power Automate flows to make that happen? The answer is daisy-chaining retention labels and bulk action.
What do I mean by “daisy-chaining” retention labels? (This is my term, not Microsoft’s) It’s a Purview retention label configuration you can have by selecting the Change the label option for the “Choose what happens after the retention period” setting during retention label creation (image).
“Daisy-chaining” retention labels can be used as a retention design pattern to accomplish a number of retention requirements. This post describes using it to indicate when something can be moved to an archive location. A picture says a thousand words, so I’ve created an infographic of the end-to-end process described in this post. You can find the infographic here
For this blog post, I’m using an internal SharePoint site as an Archive location. An external Archive location could also be the Archive target; however, that is a more complex design. All steps up to STEP 3 in this post and my infographic (the ‘Send to Archive’ step) would remain the same. Sending files to an external Archive would require more analysis to determine the External Archive’s requirements.
You might be wondering about the new Microsoft 365 Archive solution (now in Paid Preview) and how it may tie into this solution to offer cheaper, long-term storage. Once file-level archiving is introduced to the Microsoft 365 Archive solution (it now archives at a site level only), it could also be integrated with the model described in this post. This would significantly reduce the cost of long-term storage for record archiving.
Reference: https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-archive/
Here are the high level steps for Daisy-chaining labels for Archive as represented in my infographic:
STEP 1: Create a retention label to act as the (archive) replacement retention label
In my infographic, this label is called “Send to Archive”. I’ve intentionally created this with a relatively short retention period of 1 month (long enough for the move to the Archive to happen) and starting the retention when the items were labeled.
The action at the end of the retention period will depend on your own organization’s requirements. Any of these would work:
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- Automatically delete – use this option if you are copying items and you are confident that you will have copied all items you want sent to the archive location before the retention period is up. This will ensure your environment is cleaned up and any files that were not sent to the archive that had the ‘Send to Archive’ retention label will be deleted after 1 month
- Disposition Review – use this option if you are confident you will have copied or moved all items you want sent to the archive location before the retention period is up. Note that if you are moving items, you MUST clear the retention label first or else you will be prevented from moving it due to the disposition review.
- Do nothing – use this option if you are not confident that you will have copied or moved all items you want sent to the archive location before the retention period is up. The risk of this option is, of course, that items will never be deleted when they have the ‘Send to Archive’ retention label applied if you copied them to the archive location.
STEP 2: Create the original retention label(s)
These are the retention labels that will be originally applied to items that at the end of their retention period will all be replaced by the Send to Archive retention label created in STEP 1. The original retention label is “DEMO – Financial stuff” in my infographic. Many retention labels can reference the same ‘Send to Archive’ retention label making this a fairly scalable design for sending many types of business records, each with their own retention label, to an archive.
The key configuration piece for the original labels is ensuring the Change the label option is selected and then referencing the Send to Archive retention label for every retention label you want to be relabeled at the end of the retention period (image):
Business as usual happens… The retention label created in STEP 2, DEMO – Financial stuff, will be applied to content across your Finance sites. It doesn’t matter how the label is applied – manually, defaulted, or automatically. The important thing is that at the end of the retention period, the Send to Archive retention label will automatically replace the existing retention label without you having to do anything.
To demonstrate, below is a library of active records, 10 of which have the DEMO – Financial stuff retention label applied. This label is configured to be replaced with the Send to Archive at the end of the retention period:
As designed, at the end of the retention period, the Send to Archive retention label is automatically applied by the Purview System account as shown in this same library a few days later below:
STEP 3: Send to Archive
You have several options for this step and this is typically part of a larger design effort. The first decision to make is if you want to do this step manually (perhaps a good place to start?) or with an automated process. For long-term sustainability and reliability, you will likely want to consider automating this process. Please refer to a partner post to this one by Martin Lingstuyl where he describes a way to automate this. (Link: Daisy-chaining retention labels and automated archival)
Whether you’re doing it manually or automated, it’s helpful if you begin by mapping out the manual process from end-to-end. Then, when you move to automation, you can choose which parts of the process make sense to automate.
Below is the workflow process for manually moving items to an internal archive:
Above workflow described: The items are reviewed by the record owner (do you have assigned record owners?) followed by an optional approval process if not EVERYTHING needs to be sent to the Archive. Because we want to retain the version history and all metadata for the items being archived AND we want the item to be relabeled with the default Permanent retention label on the Archive library, we must MOVE the item and not COPY it. This means that the retention label must first be cleared prior to moving the item(s).
Once the retention label is cleared from all items approved for archival, we select all the items and move them to the Archive location.
In the Archive location, I have the default retention label set to Permanent so the label is automatically set:
That’s it! You can model your Archive locations across multiple sites, 1 site with many libraries, or even 1 library with many folders. Two key factors to consider for choosing the appropriate model for your archive are the volume of records over time (watch out for your site storage quota), and the permissions required for your archived records.
Thanks for reading. (and a special thank you to Martin!!)
-JCK
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