Purview archive shipped. Delete policy is still armed.

Roadmap 561208 went GA over the last few weeks with very little noise. Purview retention policies in Data Lifecycle Management can now move inactive OneDrive and SharePoint content into Microsoft 365 Archive.

The framing is storage cost. I want to talk about something else, because I think there's a gap here that's going to catch people out, and I'd like to know whether anyone else is seeing it.

Archive is a storage tier. It is not a retention state. An archived SharePoint site stays fully in scope of every retention policy that applied to it while it was active. Nothing about archiving protects content.

Now layer that onto conflict resolution. Retention beats deletion, so a site policy set to delete after 2 years goes dormant while a label is retaining the item. Dormant, not cancelled.

So picture this:

• A file carries a retention label with a 4-year retention period.
• The site it lives on has a delete-after-2-years retention policy.
• The label's end-of-retention action is deactivate retention settings.

For four years, everything looks correct. The label holds. The delete policy sits there doing nothing.

Then the label reaches end of retention and deactivates.

The shield is gone. The delete instruction wakes up, unopposed, two years overdue, and the file goes. Not to archive. Just gone.

The reflex here is "explicit wins over implicit." It doesn't apply. That principle only arbitrates between competing delete actions. A label that expires with no delete action of its own brings nothing to the contest. There is no explicit action to outrank the policy with.

"Do nothing" sounds like a safe default. It's actually a decision to stop defending the file.

Right now you cannot set a label to archive at end of retention. The options are deactivate, delete automatically, disposition review, or hand it to a Power Automate flow. Archive isn't on the list.

Microsoft shipped archive at the policy level and left the label level to flows and webhooks. That reads to me like they know the gap exists and haven't decided how to close it.

And here's my suspicion about why this shipped now. Archived content is excluded from Copilot indexing. That's Microsoft's own framing in the message center post. Which suggests this feature is going to evolve on Copilot's roadmap rather than records management's. The moment "archive" becomes the button you press to clean up Copilot's answers, people will press it constantly, at scale, without once checking what policy is sitting underneath.

Meanwhile Exchange has nothing. Purview retention still can't move mail into an archive mailbox, and we're all still running MRM tags next to Purview years after being told MRM was legacy.

Has anyone hit the deactivate-into-delete scenario in a live tenant, or is this still theoretical? And does anyone read the label-level gap differently than I do?

Genuinely open to being told I've got this wrong.