Using Office 365 retention policies with Office 365 Groups

[TonyRedmond]

As part of the Office 365 data governance framework, tenants can now create retention policies that apply to the mailbox and team site belonging to Office 365 Groups. The process is quite straightforward, but some gotchas exist that you need to think about!

https://www.petri.com/office-365-groups-compliance

[#2]

Since services like Microsoft Teams and Yammer now create Office 365 groups when provisioning does this also apply to those groups as well?   Would this work towards governing the data within those services as well.

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@TonyRedmond wrote:

As part of the Office 365 data governance framework, tenants can now create retention policies that apply to the mailbox and team site belonging to Office 365 Groups. The process is quite straightforward, but some gotchas exist that you need to think about!

https://www.petri.com/office-365-groups-compliance

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[#3]

Team chats are captured in Exchange mailboxes and therefore come under the retention policies. However, the actual chats in the teams channels are not yet governed. See https://www.petri.com/teams-compliance-story

As to Yammer, none of the Office 365 data governance functionality applies to items held inside Yammer. In an Office 365-enabled Yammer group, retention can be applied to the SharePoint content but not to conversations. See https://www.petri.com/the-rebirth-of-yammer-groups

Amazing how questions are answered in articles posted and freely available... 😉

[#4]

Wondeful insight Tony and appreciate you shedding further light as this has been a big topic for me and where I work as we wait for data retention for MS Teams.  

Hope to run into you at this years Ignite..    Thanks.

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@TonyRedmond wrote:

Team chats are captured in Exchange mailboxes and therefore come under the retention policies. However, the actual chats in the teams channels are not yet governed. See https://www.petri.com/teams-compliance-story

As to Yammer, none of the Office 365 data governance functionality applies to items held inside Yammer. In an Office 365-enabled Yammer group, retention can be applied to the SharePoint content but not to conversations. See https://www.petri.com/the-rebirth-of-yammer-groups

Amazing how questions are answered in articles posted and freely available... 😉

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[#5]

No worries. I shall be at Ignite. Definitely.

[#6]

Hi Tony, I know this is an old thread but I'm hoping you can answer a question for us that MS has not been able to answer. When enabling an Office 365 Retention Policy for an Office 365 Group, do we need to have an Exchange Online P2 license allocated for the Group Mailbox? 

If so, how do we apply this license as the mailbox is associated with a group and therefor cannot have a license applied to it.

[#7]

Nope. Group mailboxes don't need licenses. You access Office 365 Groups as part of your general Office 365 plan (including via Teams).

TR

[#8]

Hi All,

To be explicit, does user license cover the retention policies (litigation hold) as Andrew mentions above? The Team or Group itself does not require a license for this function? My understanding is that it is a licensed feature.

Thanks for your time,

S.

[#9]

Litigation hold is a specific feature for an Exchange mailbox.

Set-Mailbox -LitigationHoldEnabled $True -Identity Amailbox

See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn743673(v=exchg.160).aspx. You can't put a group mailbox on litigation hold.

The effect of a litigation hold is to hold the complete contents of a mailbox. You can accomplish the same effect for group mailboxes by creating an Office 365 retention policy through the SCC to retain all content for a long period and assign the policy to whatever group mailboxes you want to be in scope.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-retention-policies-5e377752-700d-4870-9b6d-12bf... says that you need at least an Exchange Online Plan 2 license to use a retention policy. But group mailboxes don't need a license and therefore this point is moot.

[#10]

Hi @TonyRedmond ,

Wondering if you assist please.

I may have imagined this , but back in 2018 (I know long time ago now eh?) I recall it being possible to execute a retention policy without the use of labels.

e.g. it was possible to delete content across OneDrive that was older than e.g. 30 days using a policy from the Security and Compliance centre. 

However, I'm looking at this now (in E3 )and it appears to only be possible to apply retention via Labels and Label policies. i.e. we couldn't run a default policy to simply delete everything in a OneDrive account that is older than a certain date.. a label would have to have been auto-applied or manually applied first?

Has there been a change to how this works in O365 or is this a limitation of E3? 

Cheers.

Colm

[#11]

In the SCC, go to Data Governance, then Retention, and create a new policy. Give it a name, a retention action and period, and then select all OneDrive accounts... Save the policy and you have what you want.

A policy for OneDrive

[#12]

Thanks Tony.
It was the initial UI presented when I clicked on the "retention" blade that threw me. there are tiles for "Labels" and "Label Policies" and I was expecting to see "Retention Policies" as a tile there too.
For others reference - just click the (at the moment it's blue) "Create" button and you will be able to create a policy without having to create a label first.

[#13]

@TonyRedmond  Hello from Windsor, we are a very small team that works with groups, we would like to archive all information in a group in order to make sure we can find it again easily. 

As of 2017 it was not possible, is it now ?

All the best 

Hans

[#14]

@Hans_Dahl Can't you use Microsoft Search to find the information in the group?

Teams has an archive feature that basically sets a team to be read-only. Is that what you want or is it something different?

[#15]

@TonyRedmond Hello Can I have a question related to this topic? I was searching information about what exactly is covered by retention policy targeted to Office 365 groups. And how it interacts with Sharepoint retention policy and Teams chat retention policies. But I didn`t find something useful. I understood, that Chats and team conversations can be retained only by Temas retention policy. But I`m not sure what is retained if we have additional Office 365 Groups retention policy retaining content for 1 year. I read an MSFT article where was mentioned that O365 groups retention police retain groups mailbox, files and conversations. But, The conversation should be part of Teams retention policy and this is where I`m quite confused. 

I know that my question is quite complex, but I will appreciate even some forward to related sites.

Thanks a lot,

Miroslav

[#16]

@MirekS2265:

1. The only data covered by retention policies assigned to Office 365 Groups are the conversations in the group mailbox and the documents in the site belonging to the groups.

2. You need separate policies to cover other SharePoint sites (not connected to groups). Likewise, you need separate policies to deal with Teams chat and channel conversations.

3. The same policy can cover Office 365 Groups (Microsoft 365 Groups) and SharePoint. It can't cover Teams.

All documented to the nth degree in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook...

[#17]

@TonyRedmond I have applied retention policy to office 365 group and manually started the managed folder assistant but still it’s been 3 days and emails are not getting deleted. I apply the policy to remove email older than 1 year.

[#18]

Patience... Wait at least a week to make sure that a) the retention policy has been published to Exchange Online and b) that MFA processes the mailbox. The publication process of retention policies can be very slow...

[#19]

@TonyRedmond Apologies for resurrecting this from so long ago - but I'm seeing behaviour in multiple tenants that leads me to question whether that is still the case.

Namely - that a retention policy applied only to a single Microsoft 365 group (and not applied to any SharePoint sites)...

...appears to block deletion of the group connected SharePoint site:

The behaviour when trying to delete non-empty folders from the SharePoint site also indicates a retention policy is in effect:

I will raise through the normal support channels, but if you are able to impart any wisdom, I would be grateful!

[#20]

The simple answer is that the retention policy applied to Microsoft 365 Groups covers the group mailbox and the SharePoint Online site (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/solutions/groups-teams-compliance-governance?view=o36...). What you're seeing is as expected. The retention policies applied to SharePoint sites are for non-group connected sites.