Whether your organization is looking to improve your Microsoft 365 data hygiene for “AI-readiness” or to comply with regulatory requirements, managing your records with historical, legal, regulatory, or business value while also removing content without intrinsic value is key. In Microsoft Purview, the technical retention controls to accomplish this goal are retention labels and retention policies.
Central to records management is a technology-agnostic retention schedule. This is what spells out how long you need to keep different types of content and what should happen when the time is up. As you can imagine, retention schedules come in all shapes and sizes; however, every retention schedule, big or small, exists to guide responsible records stewardship: preserve what matters, dispose of the rest.
For non-Records Managers reading this series…
If retention schedules are unfamiliar, here are a few examples to give the rest of this series some context.
I’ve worked with many customers mapping their retention schedule into the Purview File Plan, and have noticed common challenges across those schedules. For this blogpost series, I call them Hot Spots. My intent in sharing these with you is to forearm you with knowledge you will need to safely proceed. These Hot Spots are the areas that will require the most discussion and decisions to be made (by you), the most effort to automate (by you), and the most mature platform governance to implement at scale. As you can imagine, this all takes a significant amount of time.
Before pointing the finger solely at Purview, I suspect these Hot Spots are also a challenge for other modern records management solutions. The real issue is the collision of rigid, oversized, overly complex retention schedules, an explosion of digital records, and a rapidly evolving technology landscape (including, but not limited to gen AI). Together, they put enormous pressure on traditional records management practices to modernize, move faster, and make records management achievable.
My Hot Spots blogpost list
In each Hot Spot post, I break down why the issue is challenging and share practical ways to navigate it. Some of these approaches are more art than science, but the aim is always the same: stay true to the spirit and intent of the retention schedule wherever regulations allow.
For non-Records Managers, the term “Record series” in the Hot Spot list below refers to the individual records identified in a retention schedule. Some of them will become a Purview retention label. (not all!)
Hot Spot links will be enabled as each blogpost is published.
🏷️ Hot Spot 1: The number of record series
📅 Hot Spot 2: The number of record series whose retention triggers off an event
✍️ Hot Spot 3: The number of record series requiring disposition review
🤔 Hot Spot 4: Non-specific retention requirements
📋 Hot Spot 5: The Microsoft 365 dependencies
🏛️ Hot Spot 6: Archival requirements
How to use my Hot Spot list… Use it as a reference to do a thumbnail assessment of your own retention schedule to get a sense of what your path forward may look like. As a consultant who’s often asked to help map retention schedules into a Purview File Plan, I use this list to get a feel for overall complexity and effort.
The more Hot Spots you have, the more challenging the implementation will be. An undeniable truth.
Thanks for reading.
-JCK