Are Retention Policies replacing In-Place Holds and Litigation Holds?

[Daniel Niccoli]

I am currently gathering information about email preservation, as we are legally obliged to keep emails for 7 to 10 years. I read about In-Place Hold, Litigation Hold and today about Retention Policies. In the latest article I read (Overview of retention policies) it is written that …

There are several other features that have previously been used to retain or delete content in Office 365. These are listed below. These features will continue to work side by side with retention policies and labels created in the Security & Compliance Center. But moving forward, for data governance, we recommend that you use a retention policy or labels instead of all of these features. A retention policy is the only feature that can both retain and delete content across Office 365.

• Holds created for eDiscovery in the Security & Compliance Center (eDiscovery hold)
• In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold (eDiscovery hold)
• Retention tags and retention policies, also known as messaging records management (MRM) (Deletion only)
  

I just want to make sure that I learn and implement the latest technology and not invest time into something that already has a successor. But I'm a bit confused about the third item in the list because it literally says: "[…] moving forward, for data governance, we recommend that you use a retention policy or labels instead of […] Retention tags and retention policies"?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

If I am reading this right, In-Place Holds are deprecated effectively and not to be used, this function won't work by early next year at the latest, though customers that have used this function already will still be supported.  Instead, the use of Litigation Holds and Office 365 retention policies is the way to do this:

"We've postponed the July 1, 2017 deadline for creating new In-Place Holds to make a mailbox inactive. But later this year or early next year, you won't be able to create new In-Place Holds in Exchange Online. At that time, only Litigation Holds and Office 365 retention policies can be used to create an inactive mailbox. However, existing inactive mailboxes that are on In-Place Hold will still be supported, and you can continue to manage the In-Place Holds on inactive mailboxes. This includes changing the duration of an In-Place Hold and permanently deleting an inactive mailbox by removing the In-Place Hold."

This article has the steps to make a  mailbox inactive for staff that are leaving (a way to retain the mailbox data for as long as needed, while deleting the mailbox and recovering the licence) with either Litigation Hold or apply an Office 365 retention policy.  Though in your case you probably are not deleting the actual mailbox if it's for ongoing users.

Manage inactive mailboxes in Office 365

Place a mailbox on Litigation Hold

Not sure if that's helped at all but it get's you started and some other members will probably chime in.

[#3]

In general, it depends on what your needs are. Retention policies/labels can get very granular, but if you want to meet the "keep all mail for 10 years" scenario, litigation hold can get you there very quickly and can easily be automated. On the other hand, Retention policies can apply across multiple workloads, cover some advanced scenarios, including Preservation hold, and yes, they are the way forward for Microsoft's data governance solution.

Do note that we have two different functionalities with the same name now - Retention policies/tags as you know them from Exchange are different compared to Retention policies in the SCC.