Forum Discussion
SharePoint Retention Labels / Policies
Morning.
We are using SharePoint to create (and replace) are current Departmental Drives and we are going to move all the documents on the Drives to the relevant sites.
We want to apply retention policies to all documents, but not sure how to make it work in this case.
Retention counts from the date the file was created or modified in SharePoint - for the sake of this question, lets say that is Today. So if we are to keep document X for 5 years, that will be 5 years from today.
Now, Document X was actually created 4 years ago, so technically it should be deleted in 1 year. But since i am moving it to SharePoint today, It will only be deleted in 5 years from today making the file 9 years old.
Is there any way to apply policies that will work with files that are not newly created in SharePoint but moved from another location?
thanks
3 Replies
MVCuser
Have you considered using a migration tool that keeps the original modified date?
This way you avoid the problem you described. Having data in your SharePoint system that should have deleted x years ago may sound like an inconvenience with the main impact being on storage. However, there are regulations that require data to be destroyed after a certain amount of time. Keeping it for several additional years after this deletion date because of the "migration process" may no go well with the auditors / compliance officers.- Hi Paul de Jong.
I didn't know that was an option, Been trying to read all I could on the Microsoft webpages and documentation, but didn't see anything about tools. Is there any you can recommend please?
thanks again.
Kind regards, MarinaThere is useful list of tools on Collab365: https://collab365.com/best-sharepoint-migration-tools/
I noticed that the free tool from Microsoft SPMT is not listed. Definitely something to assess.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointmigration/introducing-the-sharepoint-migration-tool
Some tools are quite expensive. Find the one the best fits your requirements and budget.
FYI: It is best if the original modification date is retained during the migration.
We are working on a solution to extract the original modification dates stored within SharePoint files (docx, pdf, msg, ...) and then update the document's SharePoint modification date. This is of course only useful in case the migration has resulted in fresh modification dates. Again: retaining the original modification date is what you should aim for.
