Forum Discussion
File Plan/Retention Labels cannot be deleted OR found in content explorer
Yes, I have the exact same issue. I was able to successfully remove over a hundred old labels after clearing them off records, and disabling then deleting the associated published label policies (in Dec 2024). However, I have 2 remaining that wont delete and are also not showing up through Data Explorer and Content Explorer. I had cleared the remaining files that had either of these 2 labels on Jan 2nd, 2025 and waited 7-14 days which it typically takes to allow deletion but they are still reporting that "it's currently applied to items in your organization". These 2 labels also don't have any pending dispositions tied to them, although the Disposition section in Purview is a whole other topic with the issues I've experienced there.
I wonder if timing plays a factor here, did they update Purview in Jan 2025 and it broke something potentially?
I just got off a call with Microsoft. Nothing was solved, but we confirmed that in our Dev tenant, we only have 2 Label policies and each of these policies uses 1 File plan label. We also went into Content explorer and searched for the File plan labels and they don't show up in Content explorer. Microsoft just kept saying that the labels must be applied somewhere or else we'd be able to delete them. But if they don't show up in our policies or our explorers, how are we supposed to know where to clear them?
My teammate is looking into a Powershell script that can detect where labels are being used. YachtRock have you tried Powershell yet?
I have not tried PowerShell to locate them, in my scenario, I suspect the labels are tagged on documents within users OneDrives (that's my theory). I say this because we had a policy published out to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange at one point but now were just using policies for SharePoint.
I did have a support case open previously and they suggested using an eDiscovery (Premium) case to reindex the content (advanced Indexing) in hopes to clear ghost labels and/or identify the location of the content. I couldn't figure it out right away and honestly forgot about it, might be worth a shot though. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/ediscovery-indexing-custodian-data.
Btw, I just tried this and had no luck finding the labels that are apparently still on documents in our environment. https://sharepointmaven.com/how-to-search-content-tagged-with-a-retention-label-using-purview-content-search/
I have used Power Automate previously to locate the default retention label for SharePoint libraries before, however I haven't tried that method with OneDrive accounts and specific files, its probably a little more challenging as it would need to iterate through all users OneDrive's and then each file within their OneDrive.
Any success with the PowerShell?