Make apply retention label a required field

[Anthony_Tudor]

Hi,

My organisation is preparing for the move to O365, one of the things we are deciding is the way we going to implement retention policies in the new world. What we would like to do is to create retention labels/ policies in the Security & Compliance Center and have these surface as drop-down choices within a mandatory field within Exchange email, Office 365 groups, OneDrive and SharePoint documents.

We've set everything up, but it doesn't appear that the apply retention label field is a required field (see below). Is it possible to make this required?

Thanks 

Anthony

[#2 · Accepted solution]

AFAIK, the only way is to configure a default label that gets applied to all documents.

[#3]

Thanks for the reply 🙂 yes that was my thought too, the only other way I could think of is to have a column in every document library and each retention option albeit choice or MMS terms are mapped to a retention label the the KQL builder, but i dont really want to do that!

At least with your suggestion you kind of force the user to make a different choice if they dont like the default.

[#4]

I wouldn't get started with that too 😄
Just make sure your default label is secure enough. That way you can be rest assured that all documents will be saved.

[#5]

thank you 🙂

Do you have any recommended link for getting started with applying default labels to all content in 365?

[#6]

Check out step 19: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-and-manage-sensitivity-labels-2fb96b54-7dd2-4f0c-ac8...

[#7]

check this out https://joannecklein.com/2019/07/26/auto-apply-retention-labels-in-office-365-using-content-types-an....

Also be careful when talking about labels, there are many different kinds, Retention and Sensitivity labels have very different implementation rules.

[#8]

Hi Dean,

Thanks for the link, i've been using that one for the basis of my workaround of applying retention labels via either content types, choice columns or managed metadata.

What my organisation really wants is to be able to have a default retention label applied to all files within the O365 tenancy, much like you can with the previously mentioned sensitivity labels.

From what I can see the only way you apply a default retention label is either the Joanna Klein route or via applying a retention label at the library level, is that a fair assessment?

[#9]

What kind of industry are they in that requires everything to be retained? That seems like overkill to me.
Joanne is much more focused on this topic than I am and I trust her research.

[#10]

Hi @Dean_Gross its not that everything needs to be retained, its that everything needs a retention policy applied to it. For example, we would want three drop-down choices in the "apply retention label" field: 1 year, 3 years or 7 years. This can be easily done via retention labels, but we would like the 7 year label to be the default label applied to all files uploaded across SharePoint.

As mentioned, aside from using the keyword query editor or applying a default label to each SharePoint library there doesn't seem to be any other out the box way to achieve this.