New Retention Policies

[Matt McNabb]

So it looks like we have a new take on Retention and Preservation in Office 365:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-retention-policies-5e377752-700d-4870-9b6d-12bf...

The article here loosely states that we can now create one retention policy that blankets our entire organization for all the major workloads in Office 365. If I navigate to the Compliance Admin Center and go to the Data Governance Dashboard, it offers me a new feature to create a single Retention Policy for all of our users. This seems a little misleading as it still appears to create what I would call a Preservation Policy, and these have strict limitations around how many mailboxes and Sharepoint sites you can add to them.

Does anyone have more information regarding this? For instance, can we now create one Retention Policy for our entire organization that does not have to be continually managed by adding new mailboxes and sites to it?

Thanks!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt,

Yes you can create a single Retention Policy to protect all content that you refer.

Just make sure that all your licences supports retention.

[#3]

Just to add that any existing Preservation policies should have been converted to Retention policies.

[#4]

@Vasil Michev not according to this:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-retention-policies-5e377752-700d-4870-9b6d-12bf...

I can confirm that my existing preservation policies are still working as expected, with no apparent changes.

[#5]

Thanks for confirming - I was reading through the article and assumed that this was possible, but wasn't entirely sure. This could potentially make compliance much easier since we won't need to do any complex automation to make sure that OneDrives and mailboxes are explicitly added to a preservation policy. Now I need to go see if this is going to work for us.

Thanks!

[#6]

Well I was referring exactly to the article you linked to:

Spoiler

What happened to preservation policies?

If you were using a preservation policy, that policy has been automatically converted to a retention policy that uses only the retain action – the policy won’t delete content. The preservation policy will continue to work and preserve your content without requiring any changes from you. You can find these policies on the Retention page in the Security & Compliance Center. You can edit a preservation policy to change the retention period, but you can’t make other changes, such as adding or removing locations.

[#7]

Gotcha! I suppose I mis-read that statement - the part about the converted policy not performing any deletion. A re-read of the paragraph above is clearer now. Thanks!

[#8]

Sorry for reactivating an older post, but if a client has a hybrid deployment with all mailboxes on-prem and all archives in Exchange Online archives, does creating a single preservation policy for Exchange mailboxes mean that data is retained if deleted from the online archive?