Back in October 2021 we announced the public preview of an exciting new Microsoft Information Governance and Records Management feature called adaptive policy scopes. This feature provides advanced flexibility when applying retention policies and labels to user, site, and group locations in Microsoft 365.
Many organizations have regulatory, legal, or business requirements that demand different retention rules to apply to various departments, locations, and roles. Adaptive policy scopes help to provide the flexibility needed to achieve these requirements by allowing administrators to scope policies based on common attributes and properties from Azure AD (including those synced from on-premises AD in hybrid environments) or indexed properties from SharePoint Online sites.
However, there are also certain scenarios in which an organization may want to include or exclude locations from a policy based on more granular attributes such as the type or state of an object. This is particularly true in Exchange Online as several different types of mailboxes exist. The most common types of mailboxes are user mailboxes and Microsoft 365 group mailboxes (which are used by Microsoft 365 Modern Groups and Microsoft Teams). These mailbox types are easily targeted using adaptive policy scopes with user and group scopes, respectively.
But there are several other types and states of mailboxes that organizations commonly use. These can include shared mailboxes, resource mailboxes, and inactive mailboxes. This blog post will review how an administrator can create scopes that include or exclude these other common types of mailboxes for maximum flexibility in applying Microsoft 365 retention policies and labels.