Forum Discussion
Preservation Lock Settings for Labels
I am working with labels as a replacement to retention in SharePoint Online. To meet the 17-4a SEC rule I need to enable preservation lock. There are different policies to meet for 5, 7, 10, Forever ...
It's by design. Labels don't have the "lock" option, it's configured on the policy, and only when creating it.
Seems like an odd way to do it. I can closely correlate labels to SharePoint content types, just without the metadata. This is great for flagging content and marking them as records instead of relying on SharePoints old way, which consequently doesnt work very well in online unless you are doing inplace records.
Our original approach was going to be to send files to a records center based on an information policy and that site collection have a policy with preservation lock, but that move does not appear to work appropriately. Since I can apply both retention and deletion to a label and mark that item as a record to me it would make sense to be able to apply a preservation lock on the label since it is in effect a policy. Now when I go to create the policy container for all my labels I dont get preservation lock, which does make sense because not all of my labels may need to have preservation lock. It appears that the only way to do the preservation lock is via data governance > retention, which would then be one site collection per retention period more or less since I cant search against additional fields yet and the query editor wont necessarily ensure I am getting the right documents. One site collection per time period is tough to sell because of the user experience for end users. For instance a department may have many different types of record types with different retention periods, having them jump between site collections is not a good experience.
Well, keep in mind that Labels and in general the whole data governance suite is targetted at multple workloads, not just SharePoint. The Exchange folks have expressed similar concerns about some of the changed (lacking) functionality.
Yep, completely understand that, which i think is even more of a reason as to why it should be a part of a label. While I am not applying it to all services, in fact just focusing on one site collection per department, I can see it being used in Teams, Groups, or in the case of something like legal correspondence that is going through email, then they dont need to worry about uploading to SharePoint. I am going to speculate that it will eventually be there, just unfortunately not by the time I may need it for my current engagement.
Leaving feedback here, via the support channel or on UserVoice is one way to influence Microsoft's vision on things, I can tell you for a fact that they've already made some changes to the data governance controls because of customer feedback.
Unfortunately not many MS folks lurk in this space, but let's try Raman Kalyan :)
