Announcing general availability of Records Management

Hi Sorry to bumb up old thread.

I would like to get feedback from other users. Is the record management is working?

It has been a month , and I only have 1 disposition alert..

Does record management check every day for the documents or records that need to disposed and deleted?

Although I have once a disposition review report the counter it still shows = zero.

This is really weird

I agree with Maria_Espino_Catapult with little expansion.

There are some old concepts that still hold value. Who ever worked professionally with document/record management and in designing software solutions will tell you that you cannot ask end user to classify documents or to do anything that is outside of the user’s role. If you can provide content for metadata from the system don’t ask user to type it in…

The content management effort culminated in SharePoint 2010 with managed metadata service, taxonomy/term store, content type hub, document centers and record center followed natural information lifecycle and offered “location” context when collaborative structure followed corporate structure. The ability to propagate changes trough the corporate structure with content type hub made the whole thing alive.

Now we are at the beginning again. Garbage in garbage out, clattered libraries with security and auditing nightmare, and most of all one intelligent and promising system was dumbed down to the Box. I think Microsoft had/has chance to build something really special, something that can restructure as the fast pace market requires, the transformers comes to mind. 😊

I would ask Kennedy for help here: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!

IrinaWins I agree with you, it's cumbersome to have to do this manually. On the other hand, you may be able to 'architect' the environment so that:

• The majority of records (and other ROT content) are subject to auto-deletion retention policies
• A specific and much smaller set of document libraries map to label-based retention policies. I know there can be variations, but we found that most of our business areas had no more than 10 active libraries in a smaller set of 'records sites' (as opposed to Group-based or other sites with lower-grade retention requirements).
• An even smaller subset of document libraries that were used to store records that would be transferred to an archival institution at some point. These will never come up for disposition review. 

While the disposition review process throws up individual documents, these can be filtered by document library; if there is only a smaller subset of libraries (in point 2 above), this may be less onerous. However, the organisation needs a process to ensure that (a) the person doing the review of the library can access all the content and (b) they have somewhere to save the metadata (we used an 'Archives' SPO site for this purpose, also used to manage paper records).  

I had another related question last week. Some organisations may want to keep what they call a record 'stub' when a record is deleted (or certain other actions such as migrated) from the library; so the library shows the record USED TO exist but was deleted at a given time, on the authority of someone. I don't think this is possible in SPO unless you export the metadata to a list instead. 

Hi Andrew Warland , Thanks for your comment. We are using this approach as a workaround at the moment. However this workaround does require a lot of time and effort and therefore would not work well for large organisations which are disposing large volumes of records located in different libraries. It would be great to have all metadata available for export as part of the pending disposition review process as well as available in the deleted documents report/'proof of disposal' feature in the system. 

IrinaWins given the very limited metadata recorded when records are destroyed, my recommendation is to use the disposition review option as a heads-up for records managers to go back to the original document library, review the content, export the full set of metadata (which includes the original document library location) and save that to another location (such as an 'Archives' site, which is what we used), then return to the dispositions area to do the deletion (to keep the records there). Then delete the original library, otherwise you will end up with a library that has nothing in it and nothing showing why. It might sound like a lot of work but in practice it's not that bad, especially if you have set up document libraries well (e..g., to map them to activities in a function-mapped site). 

Also, in most cases you cannot reasonably expect end-users to apply label-based retention policies in their mailboxes. I think it's safer to go with a single retention period (say 10 years) for all mailboxes and a longer retention (or permanent retention) policy for specific mailboxes. 

Remember too that copies of Teams chat messages are copied from the backend Azure database to either personal (1:1 chat) or Microsoft 365 Group (channel chat) mailboxes. Increasingly I see the value of using Microsoft 365 Groups (with a mailbox and SPO site, linked to a Team if required) to manage specific types of records. 

In the meantime, while I understand Microsoft's idea of using AI as much as possible to automate the classification and retention/disposal of records, I see too much risk in applying these advanced Information Governance options (aka 'records management') except in specific situations. 

IrinaWins Thank you for asking about metadata at disposal, check out the details of our "Proof of disposal" feature which is rolling out right now (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/disposition?view=o365-worldwide#disposition-of-records), appreciate your link to User Voice, we definitely will continue to prioritize and improve on what information we keep at disposal of records to help organizations meet their standards.

When it comes to records management, will any consideration be given to compliance requirements in the government sector? For example, under the New Zealand Public Records Act all government agencies are required to retain certain metadata when disposing records, however pending disposition report in the Compliance centre does not allow capturing and exporting that metadata before document disposal (for more information check UserVoice suggestion at https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/289138-office-365-security-compliance/suggestions/34375546-allow-adding-metadata-fields-to-pending-dispositio).

Unfortunately such limitations make Microsoft’s Records Management solution unfit for purpose in the government sector.

Thanks for the interest JudiP - most of the Records Management functionality should already be there for GCC customers and the rest is coming soon, this is definitely a priority so we would strongly encourage your customers to validate the functionality in their tenant and connect with their Microsoft account team on their needs around Records Management.

When you filter the roadmap for GCC, nothing shows up as in development on this topic. That doesn't seem to be in alignment with the statement that, "we definitely are working on getting this out to GCC." And, for 12 days now, no response to the question on how long the validation is expected to take. Also disappointing. Our client is a large state (57,000 G5 licenses) that is launching a records management/data retention project next month. I'm guessing that this functionality might be of interest, but with no clue when it will be available, announcements like this create much more frustration than enthusiasm.

robertoy  - three quick questions for you:

Could I confirm that with regards to access to the Disposition area counts as a 'location' in regard to the following statement? "At a high level, everyone with edit access to a location where records management features are used must be licensed."  i.e. that in a predominantly E3 tenancy, where the Disposition area is the only premium feature being used, that only users who require edit access to the Disposition area need premium (E5+) licences (and not all users who need to access content in sites/inboxes, which might later be subject to disposition review)?

Secondly, could you clarify licence needs for setting default labels on libraries/folders? Many large organisations I have worked with have invested significantly into architectures that use this feature with Office 365 E3 (or below) - one even got this confirmed by Microsoft as being fine at E3. Could you confirm that default labelling is not counted as automatic classification?

Finally, could you clarify the licence requirements for applying immutability to labelled content via PowerShell (as opposed to via the ‘Use label to classify content as a “Record”’ checkbox)? Is this now moving to a premium (E5+) licence too, or does this continue to be available for E3 tenants?