Adaptive policy scopes add a new way to deploy retention policies and retention labels. With this new feature, administrators can target retention policies to groups of users, SharePoint sites, and Microsoft 365 Groups, which includes Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Information Governance helps organizations classify and govern data at scale. It retains data and manages records where users collaborate to prevent productivity loss. Microsoft Information Governance allows organizations to keep what they need and delete what they do not need.

We are excited to announce adaptive policy scopes, which add a new way to deploy retention in Microsoft 365. With this new feature, we can deploy retention policies and labels to groups of users, SharePoint sites and Microsoft 365 Groups (including Microsoft Teams) dynamically using attributes and properties to determine inclusion or exclusion from the policies.

Adaptive policy scopes also work within our Microsoft Records management solution. Before we dive into the announcement, let us set some context by looking at how retention works today.

How retention works today

Currently, when you create a retention policy or a retention label policy, you need to make three decisions:

\n
1. Decide the policy configuration settings. These settings include configuring the retention and deletion settings for your policy. A retention label can have disposition review and you can prevent users from editing files with this retention label.
\n
2. Decide how to apply the settings. Options include automatically applying the retention policy or having end users manually label content.
\n
3. Decide where to apply the settings. This option allows you to choose locations where the policy will be active. For example, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or Exchange.
\n

Figure 1: Decisions to create a retention policy or a retention label policy – before adaptive policy scopes

The retention policy can also include or exclude specific locations. For example, if you want the retention policy to apply to only specific SharePoint sites or specific mailboxes. However, including or excluding locations requires you to comply with per policy include/exclude limits on the number of specific locations. If you exceed these limits, you must create additional policies with the same retention settings. You can see the specific limits for each location here.

Our customers have given us feedback that these types of static scopes work well when you want to set a retention policy for one or more entire locations. For example, applying a policy to all Microsoft Teams chats. It also works if there are a small number of inclusions or exclusions to the policy which do not change often over time. However, many organizations have requirements to apply certain policies to certain sites, locations, departments, and more.

As an example, you might want to apply a different set of retention policies to all users, SharePoint sites, teams, and Yammer messages for content assets in Germany. Because new users are joining and leaving the company, and there are often new sites and teams, and organizations need to dynamically update these policies without manual intervention. Previously, organizations had to manually maintain these policies and customers were building complex PowerShell scripts to manage these static scopes at scale.

Announcing the public preview of adaptive policy scopes

We are introducing adaptive policy scopes to help solve the challenges above. Adaptive policy scopes:

\n
• Manage policy targeting with user, group, or site attributes. Microsoft Information Governance updates the scopes automatically, so policies stay current as users join and leave roles, as users create and delete SharePoint sites, and throughout the Microsoft Teams lifecycle.
\n
• Adaptive policy scopes are not subject to per policy limits. They are not subject to the include/exclude limits we discussed earlier.
\n
• A new policy lookup tool. This tool helps administrators understand which policy applies to a specific location. For example, you can lookup a user's mailbox and see all the retention policies and retention label policies that apply to that location. More information on policy lookups.
\n

Figure 2: Decisions to create a retention policy or a retention label policy – after adaptive policy scopes

With this change, we are adding an additional retention option for where organizations can apply retention. We are also renaming the previous location selection option to a Static scope.

\n
• Static scope (previously the only option): Choose the location containing the content you want to retain. If locations change after you create this policy, for example, if a SharePoint site is added or removed, you will need to manually update the policy.
\n
• Adaptive scope: Consists of attributes or properties, e.g., Department or country, that define the users, groups, or sites in your organization. You will choose supported locations containing the content you want to retain. The policy will automatically update to match the criteria defined in the scope.
\n

A policy will have a dynamic scope or a static scope. You still have the option to choose specific locations where the policy will be active, which allows for a lot of flexibility in how retention policies are deployed.

How to define an adaptive policy scope

How do you create these policies? The policies are defined using attributes available on a user's profile, on the Microsoft 365 group, or in the SharePoint site property bag. For those familiar with Azure Active Directory dynamic group membership, adaptive policy scopes work in a similar way.

Figure 3: Creating an adaptive policy scope

For a full list of attributes that are available along with the locations they support, please click here for more information.

Please let us know how you plan to use adaptive policy scopes in your organization. If you have any ideas you would like to share or questions, please put them in the comments below. If you are ready to try adaptive policy scopes, please sign up for an E5 Compliance trial or purchase licenses here.

Microsoft Information Governance helps organizations classify and govern data at scale. It retains data and manages records where users collaborate to prevent productivity loss. Microsoft Information Governance allows organizations to keep what they need and delete what they do not need.

We are excited to announce adaptive policy scopes, which add a new way to deploy retention in Microsoft 365. With this new feature, we can deploy retention policies and labels to groups of users, SharePoint sites and Microsoft 365 Groups (including Microsoft Teams) dynamically using attributes and properties to determine inclusion or exclusion from the policies.

Adaptive policy scopes also work within our Microsoft Records management solution. Before we dive into the announcement, let us set some context by looking at how retention works today.

How retention works today

Currently, when you create a retention policy or a retention label policy, you need to make three decisions:

\n
1. Decide the policy configuration settings. These settings include configuring the retention and deletion settings for your policy. A retention label can have disposition review and you can prevent users from editing files with this retention label.
\n
2. Decide how to apply the settings. Options include automatically applying the retention policy or having end users manually label content.
\n
3. Decide where to apply the settings. This option allows you to choose locations where the policy will be active. For example, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or Exchange.
\n

Figure 1: Decisions to create a retention policy or a retention label policy – before adaptive policy scopes

The retention policy can also include or exclude specific locations. For example, if you want the retention policy to apply to only specific SharePoint sites or specific mailboxes. However, including or excluding locations requires you to comply with per policy include/exclude limits on the number of specific locations. If you exceed these limits, you must create additional policies with the same retention settings. You can see the specific limits for each location here.

Our customers have given us feedback that these types of static scopes work well when you want to set a retention policy for one or more entire locations. For example, applying a policy to all Microsoft Teams chats. It also works if there are a small number of inclusions or exclusions to the policy which do not change often over time. However, many organizations have requirements to apply certain policies to certain sites, locations, departments, and more.

As an example, you might want to apply a different set of retention policies to all users, SharePoint sites, teams, and Yammer messages for content assets in Germany. Because new users are joining and leaving the company, and there are often new sites and teams, and organizations need to dynamically update these policies without manual intervention. Previously, organizations had to manually maintain these policies and customers were building complex PowerShell scripts to manage these static scopes at scale.

Announcing the public preview of adaptive policy scopes

We are introducing adaptive policy scopes to help solve the challenges above. Adaptive policy scopes:

\n
• Manage policy targeting with user, group, or site attributes. Microsoft Information Governance updates the scopes automatically, so policies stay current as users join and leave roles, as users create and delete SharePoint sites, and throughout the Microsoft Teams lifecycle.
\n
• Adaptive policy scopes are not subject to per policy limits. They are not subject to the include/exclude limits we discussed earlier.
\n
• A new policy lookup tool. This tool helps administrators understand which policy applies to a specific location. For example, you can lookup a user's mailbox and see all the retention policies and retention label policies that apply to that location. More information on policy lookups.
\n

Figure 2: Decisions to create a retention policy or a retention label policy – after adaptive policy scopes

With this change, we are adding an additional retention option for where organizations can apply retention. We are also renaming the previous location selection option to a Static scope.

\n
• Static scope (previously the only option): Choose the location containing the content you want to retain. If locations change after you create this policy, for example, if a SharePoint site is added or removed, you will need to manually update the policy.
\n
• Adaptive scope: Consists of attributes or properties, e.g., Department or country, that define the users, groups, or sites in your organization. You will choose supported locations containing the content you want to retain. The policy will automatically update to match the criteria defined in the scope.
\n

A policy will have a dynamic scope or a static scope. You still have the option to choose specific locations where the policy will be active, which allows for a lot of flexibility in how retention policies are deployed.

How to define an adaptive policy scope

How do you create these policies? The policies are defined using attributes available on a user's profile, on the Microsoft 365 group, or in the SharePoint site property bag. For those familiar with Azure Active Directory dynamic group membership, adaptive policy scopes work in a similar way.

Figure 3: Creating an adaptive policy scope

For a full list of attributes that are available along with the locations they support, please click here for more information.

Please let us know how you plan to use adaptive policy scopes in your organization. If you have any ideas you would like to share or questions, please put them in the comments below. If you are ready to try adaptive policy scopes, please sign up for an E5 Compliance trial or purchase licenses here.

Adaptive policy scopes add a new way to deploy retention policies and retention labels. With this new feature, administrators can target retention policies to groups of users, SharePoint sites, and Microsoft 365 Groups, which includes Microsoft Teams.

Hi Erica,

> All users included in an adaptive policy scope are required to have some flavor of E5 compliance license. 

So how does this work for inactive mailboxes, which by definition have no license assigned to them, but can still be targeted by an adaptive policy?

Erica,

Thanks for the response.  So, they need to have \"some flavor of E5 compliance license\" in order to run the retention, but not to be chosen in the scope?

Hi Tundra2014 welcome to Microsoft Information Governance! All users included in an adaptive policy scope are required to have some flavor of E5 compliance license. This includes users who are owners or members of SharePoint sites included in scopes, or owners or members of Microsoft 365 Groups (Teams) included in a scope.

Good Morning,

New to MS Information Governance.  I have a question on the licensing.  Article states that all users/admins would need to have an E5 license for this to work.  Currently I have an E5 and users have an E3.  I was able to create the Adaptive scopes and it populated the users that were specified in the query.  If I were to use the queries in Retention Polices, would they work?

Hey Chris Blackburn 

I'm happy to help with your questions. 

First, fileextension is already a queryable property, so you shouldn't' need to map it to a refinable managed property.  You can just use it directly in a KQL query:

fileextension:mp4

See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/keyword-queries-and-search-conditions?view=o365-worldwide#searchable-site-properties

Second, adaptive policy scopes determines the location a policy applies based on site properties - not the properties of the items within a site.  So you can use adaptive scopes to apply a policy to a site based on the URL (like the first half of the query in your image) since that is a site property - but not fileextension as it is an item property.

But the fileextension property can be used with auto-labeling.  So what you will probably want to do is create an adaptive scope that applies to the URL, then create an auto-labeling policy that applies to the adaptive scope and uses KQL to auto-label based on file extension. 

I hope this is helpful.  Thanks!

Hi Erica i hope you can help!

I have a customer who has an interesting use case of looking to exclude ALL MP4 files in OneDrive from directive of their legal council around potential discovery with data inside of recordings, so in conjunction with Teams autopurge also want to ensure it doesn't end up in their 7 years of retention.

In the Sharepoint Admin | More Features | Manage Search Schema on how to modify a RefinableSearch entry and I have successfully (i think?) added an entry mapping one of these to the FileExtension property

Ive then setup an adaptive search (maybe successfully?) to just find MP4 files and I'm not seeing any OneDrive sites being added to the scope

My hopes were to take this a step further and create a new retention policy just for OneDrive that EXCLUDES these files (which Im still nooding on how to accomplish - would LOVE your input) files but without being able to even define an adaptive scope successfully, I'm somewhat at a loss and hope I can pick your brain on what I'm doing wrong and how to establish this use case.

Thank you so much!

Chris Blackburn

Solutions Architect

Concurrency

Thank you EricaToelle , I think many people won't think about that behavior of rentention policies and adaptive scopes.

Another licensing-thing: what about a compliance office or data protection responsible person who wants to use the content explorer to find special kinds of data on sharepoint online? Is there one license per researcher enough?

Hi Thilo Graf the adaptive policy scope licensing is how I described it above. Both users and admins benefit from the service and must be licensed. 

If a user changes departments, any content that was labeled under the previous scope will stay labeled, and there keep the same retention settings. If using retention policies, any content in the container, e.g., the mailbox or OneDrive, will follow any new retention settings, so will not have the previous scope's retention settings.

Hey EricaToelle , when there is a adaptive scope for a department, what happens to the E-Mail or OneDrive data already under retenition when a user changes departments? Is it still under retention? 

EricaToelle NateAD , I have a different opinion about licensing:
Microsoft S&C licensing always talks abount users who benefits from a feature. The user who benefits from the adaptive scope is the admin, because he does not need to check and update the policies manually if a user needs to be added (or removed). So a licence for all admins that can access the retention policies need to be licensed.