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Brenden Keane's avatar
Brenden Keane
Copper Contributor
Sep 11, 2018
Solved

Modified Retention Policy

We are in the early stages of testing an O365 rollout and ran into some issues with a Retention policy in Data Governance. It was initially applied to all mailboxes, then changed to only apply to all but one recipient. Even though that recipient is no longer in the policy setting, I'm still seeing it applied when I'm in their OWA => right click user's Name => Assign Policy. I am unable to uncheck the policy when clicking in that location.

  • Adam Ochs's avatar
    Adam Ochs
    Sep 14, 2018

    Hey Brenden Keane,

     

    I have had my share of headaches rolling this out for a client, and trying to get it to work in the timeframe you wanted.

     

    MRM policies are tied directly to the Managed Folder Assistant (MFA) in exchange online 

     

    As my friend VasilMichev pointed out, the MFA only runs ones roughly every 7 days (although its not like its sitting there and at 1am on a Monday always runs.) So if you go through an apply a policy to a users mailbox on say a Monday. That Thursday maybe the policy runs. The following Friday your users goes through and tags stuff with the new policy. Well it could be later in the following week before you see any changes to the stuff they taged.

     

    In our experience it was just really really hard to know exactly when/if it was working.

     

    You can however essentially ask that your mailbox be put in the queue to run the MFA on the EXO servers:

    Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity "Mailbox"

    This works great for initial testing, but not long term. So why you are trying to confirm your MRM policy is working/for this user. Go in and run the above command once you know the policy has been applied, and a short time later (Probably 30 min to a few hours depending on the Microsoft Queue,) you should see the application to that mailbox.

     

    Note this command is really meant to just do something like mention above, testing. If you do it repeatedly, (like write a script to try to do this once a day) you will get throttled.

     

    So for your testing, once the policy is on, run that command and see if you have success.


    Goodluck!
    Adam

5 Replies

  • When did you exclude the user from the policy? It might take a while (7 days or so I believe) until the changes are reflected. You can check the policy distribution status with PowerShell. Or just open a support case.

    • Brenden Keane's avatar
      Brenden Keane
      Copper Contributor

      I made the change 8 days ago at this point. Even resorted to deleting the policy as a whole yesterday, and still no change.

      • Adam Ochs's avatar
        Adam Ochs
        Steel Contributor

        Hey Brenden Keane,

         

        I have had my share of headaches rolling this out for a client, and trying to get it to work in the timeframe you wanted.

         

        MRM policies are tied directly to the Managed Folder Assistant (MFA) in exchange online 

         

        As my friend VasilMichev pointed out, the MFA only runs ones roughly every 7 days (although its not like its sitting there and at 1am on a Monday always runs.) So if you go through an apply a policy to a users mailbox on say a Monday. That Thursday maybe the policy runs. The following Friday your users goes through and tags stuff with the new policy. Well it could be later in the following week before you see any changes to the stuff they taged.

         

        In our experience it was just really really hard to know exactly when/if it was working.

         

        You can however essentially ask that your mailbox be put in the queue to run the MFA on the EXO servers:

        Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity "Mailbox"

        This works great for initial testing, but not long term. So why you are trying to confirm your MRM policy is working/for this user. Go in and run the above command once you know the policy has been applied, and a short time later (Probably 30 min to a few hours depending on the Microsoft Queue,) you should see the application to that mailbox.

         

        Note this command is really meant to just do something like mention above, testing. If you do it repeatedly, (like write a script to try to do this once a day) you will get throttled.

         

        So for your testing, once the policy is on, run that command and see if you have success.


        Goodluck!
        Adam

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