Office 365 Records Management and Compliance Resource Documentation

Thanks Mike. Microsoft have done a great job aligning various parts of Office 365 with common records management requirements. I understand your comment about using third-party partners to build on this foundation to address 'additional' requirements. 

I don't see a problem with auto-destruction if it is applied appropriately and the business understands the potential risks involved.

However the requirement to review individual records via a disposition review could be made much more useful with only a couple of changes. My concern is that, once you get thousands of records to review at a time, I think that this option will become much less useful than it appears at present. It would be similar to going through every physical document in a box of records to work out if the entire box needs to be kept - as much as possible, disposal should be at the 'aggregation' level, not the individual items. 

I would suggest that the 'Finalise decision' dialogue box have one additional option: 'Review document library'. Clicking this option would take the reviewer to the original document library where they can review the content of the library in the context of the site in which they were created, and export the metadata if required. This is the first step in the process. 

I would also suggest that the option to 'Dispose of the records' include the options to (a) export the original metadata (with a destination or download option) and (b) delete the original document library (yes/no). Otherwise you will end up with empty libraries and no clue as to what they contained. Knowing what was destroyed is an important recordkeeping requirement. 

Perhaps partners can do this, or have solutions that are better than the Microsoft out of the box options. But, having come so far with a recordkeeping disposal solution, it would be a pity if Microsoft didn't take the opportunity to complete the solution, without having to bring in partners.