Strong data and document discovery is key for organizations in responding to both internal and external inquiries. Investigative and security teams need to be able to search for sensitive documents across the organization. Compliance teams must be able to make sure that customer and employee data is being handled properly to meet regulatory requirements. Legal teams need a way to search through large data sets to find and sort content that is relevant in order to respond to legal requests and inquiries.
Using traditional methods of searching for data, like using on-prem workflows for modern cloud environments, can prove increasingly challenging for organizations, especially as technology continues to evolve and expand. Digital communications and collaboration have exploded in the last two years, resulting in more and more data for teams to sort and prioritize. This means that past approaches of “export all my data for analysis” can be incredibly time-consuming and costly for organizations dealing with growing data sets.
This growth of data and digital communications is something we have seen across Microsoft 365 users and customers. There are over 250 million monthly active users of Microsoft Teams globally, and over 200 million monthly active users of SharePoint Online. Data and documents are constantly being created as Microsoft 365 users collaborate. In fact, there is an average of 38 billion minutes of collaboration on Microsoft 365 every day!
Sorting through this data to locate and process relevant data can be a significant burden for organizations and teams. Advanced eDiscovery in Microsoft 365 makes the eDiscovery process easier by allowing you to discover and collect your data in place and accelerate the efficiency of your discovery process.
Advanced eDiscovery’s capabilities continue to expand, with new features and experiences to support legal, compliance, and investigative teams to discover relevant data. At Microsoft Inspire earlier this year, Microsoft announced new advancements for Advanced eDiscovery for discovering Microsoft Information Protection-encrypted content like cloud attachments, larger case and review set sizes, collecting Teams content as HTML transcripts and new predictive coding capabilities in our blog post, Further Streamlining the eDiscovery Review Process - Microsoft Tech Community.
Today we are excited to announce additional capabilities in public preview to Advanced eDiscovery in Microsoft 365:
- Discover specific document versions with new capabilities, including finding versions as shared and historical versions.
- Streamline your legal holds with auto-scaling.
- Write more effective queries with the new Keyword Query Language (KQL) editor experience
These new capabilities make it easier to discover content and build an eDiscovery case in your Microsoft Compliance center.
Discover specific document versions with new capabilities
The sharing of documents and cloud attachments has become crucial for collaboration and communication, and organizations often have a legal and regulatory obligation to preserve and make that content discoverable.
Historically, as part of legacy or on-prem systems, copies of the attachments in emails would be automatically stored as part of the message. As documents moved to the cloud, keeping track of versions that were modified and shared can become challenging, particularly if an organization cannot identify which versions were shared with which users. Legal teams often choose to over-preserve their documents and preserve all versions of a document in order to meet their legal and regulatory obligations. Doing this results in larger amounts of data, leading to increased time and cost to review each document.
Advanced eDiscovery now supports the ability to discover the version of the document at the time that it was shared. This capability is key for organizations that are moving to the cloud, as more users start to share attachments as links from documents hosted on the cloud rather than attaching them directly to an email.
For example, A team may be collaborating on a Word document shared on OneDrive or SharePoint, and a version of this document gets shared with on Outlook or Teams via a cloud attachment. Advanced eDiscovery is now able to discover the specific version of the document that was shared.
Advanced eDiscovery displaying the Pricing Guidelines for X1050.docx cloud attachment
For organizations concerned with saving and identifying the right versions of a document, being able to search versions shared is an important feature.
Microsoft is also taking our version discovery a step further, with our announcement of the new Historical Versions feature, available in public preview next week. Historical versioning allows organizations to quickly search across not only the current version of documents in SharePoint, but all the previous versions of those documents. This functionality can be key for organizations that want to be able to preserve and search through old versions of documents on SharePoint, especially in order to identify those specific versions that may be relevant to an investigation or a case.
Streamline your legal holds with auto-scaling (public preview)
With growing amounts of data, being able to place legal holds on larger amounts of data is critical. Today we are rolling out auto-scaling for Advanced eDiscovery legal into public preview. This means that any time an eDiscovery user reaches the legal hold limit, the system will automatically scale up the legal hold as needed, adding data locations to multiple holds as needed. In the past, legal holds within Advanced eDiscovery would limit the hold to 1,000 mailboxes or 100 SharePoint sites, but with the new auto-scaling capability, organizations using Advanced eDiscovery are better able to streamline their legal hold processes.
Write more effective queries with the new Keyword Query Language (KQL) editor experience
Microsoft is excited to announce that the new Keyword Query Language (KQL) editor experience is available as part of public preview. This new KQL editor experience means it is easier for users to quickly create an effective query, with updates to the auto-filling common properties and parameters, and by highlighting potential errors with recommended mitigations. This KQL experience will be available in hold query (Advanced + Core eDiscovery), searches (Core), and collections (Advanced). See more on the KQL capabilities here: Use the KQL editor to build search queries - Microsoft 365 Compliance | Microsoft Docs
Compliance Trial
We are happy to share that there is now an easier way for you to try Microsoft compliance solutions directly in the Compliance Admin Center with a free trial. By enabling the trial in the Compliance center, you can quickly start using all capabilities of Microsoft Compliance, including Insider Risk Management, Records Management, Advanced Audit, Advanced eDiscovery, Communication Compliance, Microsoft Information Protection, Data Loss Prevention, and Compliance Manager.
This trial is currently rolling out to tenants worldwide and you can learn more about it here.
Learn More
Microsoft will be hosting an upcoming webinar series focused on Advanced eDiscovery! Sign up: You can register for this webinar as part of our Advanced eDiscovery webinar series.
- “What’s New in Advanced eDiscovery? Fall 2021”, November 10th at 9am U.S. PT (separate session on November 12th for APAC)
- “How to use the Microsoft Graph API for Advanced eDiscovery,” November 17th at 9am U.S. PT (APAC session on November 19th)
- “How to use Advanced eDiscovery with Microsoft Teams,” December 1st at 9am PT (APAC session December 3rd)
We also have a “Become a Microsoft 365 Advanced eDiscovery NINJA” resource page, designed to be a one-stop shop for learning about Advanced eDiscovery, including best practices and capabilities. Each section also includes an optional knowledge check to test your familiarity with Advanced eDiscovery. You can visit the Advanced eDiscovery Ninja page here: https://aka.ms/ediscoveryninja.
