July 31, 2024 – Bo – Microsoft 365 Business Consultant
More and more organizations are embracing Microsoft 365 as a document management system, intranet or collaboration platform. With the huge increase in data stored in OneDrive, Teams or SharePoint as well as emails sent through Outlook, an efficient retention policy is crucial. This helps you comply with laws and regulations, and ensures an organized and productive work environment.
Whether you’ve already started manually labeling documents or are still developing policies, a well-designed retention policy offers many benefits. Not only do employees work more efficiently by retrieving documents faster, you also keep more storage space in SharePoint. Additionally, a well-designed retention policy helps with AVG and Archive Act compliance, from which you are required to delete certain information in a timely manner (which I previously wrote a blog about: ‘The benefits of Data Lifecycle management’). For this, you can use Microsoft Purview.
With Microsoft Purview, you apply both manual and automatic retention to documents. In this blog, I will elaborate on the disadvantages of manual labeling and how to do it automatically with Microsoft Purview.
Manually labeling documents is often a cheaper solution because you don’t need an expensive Microsoft 365 E5 license for this, for example. Only this does come with some risks. The responsibility for labeling documents lies with employees, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Employees must not only label each document individually, but also be well aware of the rules surrounding document labeling. It often happens that documents are not labeled at all or employees choose the longest retention period out of convenience or ignorance. The interests of employees often differ from those of management in this area.
Increase efficiencyiency and save time: Automatic labeling takes the task out of the hands of employees, saving significant time and reducing the likelihood of human error.
Ensures consistency and compliance with laws and regulations: With automatic labeling, documents are labeled consistently, which helps ensure compliance with laws and regulations such as records laws.
Improved data management: Automatic labeling and timely deletion of documents keeps the work environment clean and uncluttered, making it easier to manage.
By setting up automatic labeling with Microsoft Purview, retention labels are applied based on preset conditions. Users do not have to do anything for this themselves; the system automatically applies the label as soon as the context or content meets the set criteria.
Automatic labeling with Microsoft Purview can be set up in several ways, depending on your organization’s needs.
1. Site or team level.:
Applying a retention policy at the site or team level is the easiest way of automatic labeling. All content on a site is automatically assigned the retention label. This is often a good basis but usually does not yet meet the requirements. Often this method of labeling is used as a starting point when implementing a retention policy because it already covers part of the policy. From there, the policy is further expanded and applied.
2. Using scopes.:
Scopes are used to determine the retention label based on context, such as document location, document type or user attributes (think function, department or office location).
3. On the basis of an event:
With this method, documents receive a retention label based on metadata. For example, if the “Status” column changes to “Approved,” a retention label is automatically applied. With an event-based retention method, you set that this document automatically gets a retention label applied.
4. Classifiers:
Classifiers is the most advanced method for retention. They use AI and pattern recognition to label documents based on content. Sensitive information types label based on specific sensitive information such as BSN numbers, while trainable classifiers recognize documents based on properties that are difficult to detect with standard methods. These classifiers adjust retention labels as the content of the document changes.
It is clear that there are several methods to apply a retention policy with Microsoft 365. Each company has its own specific needs and requirements, and the chosen method should be tailored accordingly. Often a combination of methods is the best approach or a chosen method serves as a stepping stone to a more detailed and precise application.
Start setting up an effective retention policy today with Microsoft Purview. Need help? Then contact us for appropriate advice!
Engage in the conversation!
Are you stuck with an IT challenge and want to spar with our experts to find an appropriate solution and approach together? Contact us to address your issue!
