OneDrive Retention broken for new Users with no fix in sight according to Microsoft?

[Ivan Unger]

Hi everyone,

For the last 2 or 3 months I've noticed that we were unable to enable Retention Policies for OneDrives of newly created users and have created a Ticket with Office 365 Support (Ticket #:15114229 if anyone from Microsofts reads this).

We have managed to find a workaround, though I still believe this isn't a proper workaround, especially not with many users. 

The workaround is to give me (the Office 365 Global Admin, and Sharepoint and ....) Site Collection Administrator rights to the Users OneDrive (SharePoint Site). This can be done via the new User Management Pane on admin.microsoft.com or through Classic SharPoint Management User Profiles Management. 

Only then are we able to activate the Retention Policy with the users OneDrive in it.

The feedback from the escalation team was that there is (and most likely will not be) a "bug" registered and therefore no fix will be developed. This is the current state of OneDrive Retention Policeis and I could create a UserVoice entry to make it known. Also there might be some work on a long-long-term solution/change for this. No details mentioned.

I hope that every admin around here recognizes that this obviously not a proper state. Thats like having to give myself access to every exchange mailbox in order to manage it first. 

Maybe someone could give a OneDrive or Security & Compliance Product Manager a ping to make them aware of this.

Also could some of you verify if you experience the same issue with newly created users. Mine are Azure AD Connect synced users by the way. I haven't yet tried with new cloud-only users yet. Also I can manage the retention policies for previsouly created OneDrive Sites just fine, without being Site Collection Administrator.

[#2]

I seem to recall calling this out previously and was under the impression that it was fixed. @Tony Redmond might recall better.

FWIW, I did a test in my tenant, and was able to add the ODFB URL for a user I've created a week or so ago. 

[#3]

@Vasil Michev I was able to edit a retention policy and add a recently-added OneDrive account to it. I haven't heard of recent issues.

[#4]

Thanks @Tony Redmond and @Vasil Michev ,

My feedback is from yesterday. I even received two calls with apologies, since they will not be able to fix the issue. Any ideas on how to proceed?

[#5]

If they acknowledge it as a bug, they should fix it. Talk to your TAM, get them to remind the engineering team that you are a paying customer :)

[#6]

This is still an issue.  We created about 120 users about 5 months ago and when we try to apply retention policies now, we sometimes have this issue.  It works fine for some users, but not others.  Using the workaround fixes the issue, but shouldn't be necessary.