Announcing general availability of Records Management

Hi, the question about 'how this is different from Information Governance' has this response: our Information Governance solution focuses on providing a simple way to keep the data you want and delete what you don’t, the Records Management solution is geared towards meeting the record-keeping requirements of your business policies and external regulations. This will be the only location where you can create record labels'

Does this mean you will remove the ability to create and publish record labels from the Information Governance section? If so, what will the 'simple way to keep the data you want and delete what you don't want', if this is not based on labels? 

Sorry, but it's a bit unclear - my Info Gov (E3) licence still shows the ability to create and publish labels. What will happen to those if you remove the options? 

It is generally accepted that records management is a function of information governance. In many organizations records management is a key function of the information governance program. Why separate them? How does separating records management from information governance simplify deployment, adoptability, and everyday usage? 

Hello team, 

So excited to test drive this new functionality!  Question:  Does this mean that in the near future you will be deprecating the Records Center feature of SharePoint?  If so,  that's a BUMMER as many clients of ours still use that feature quite heavily.   And if not,  when will we get an updated Records Center template (and Document Center one too) for SharePoint modern?  Both of those are still very heavily used, specifically during migration efforts where folks do not (or cannot based on compliance rules) delete files but do not necessarily want to surface them to the general public. 

Thank you, 

Maria E.

Any word on availability for GCC?

Surely, you have a idea on how long the validation would take. Are we talking 6 months, 12 months, 24 months?   When Microsoft makes these announcements, you must know that the GCC customers are interested also.  We have budget cycles and purchasing regulations that require us to plan out our strategies.  It would be nice to know if I should consider this offering, next year or the next, or consider a large purchase of a product that is currently available.  

I've said this before, Microsoft's product development and release needs to address all customers and communicate. 

I agree with aleace  that it makes no sense to separate records management from information governance. The two scenarios as described don't support the common use of these terms internationally. If anything, your 'records management' could be described as 'Advanced information governance'.

I would also add that 'declaring a record' is a peculiarly American practice that means nothing in places like Australia. 

You describe two distinct scenarios which I have mapped to the Service Descriptions (the link you included). Please let me know if these are not correct:

1. Info Governance (E3/E5) - 'Broad policies to catch everything and keep it simple'. According to the service description 'a single organization-wide or location-wide retention policy and/or manual retention labeling'. These are very useful and are closest to actual records management practices.

2. Records Management (E5) - 'Deeper dives into classifying content, enforcing particular process and workflows'. According to the service description, this means 'automatically applying retention labels or policies, starting the retention period of a retention label based on a custom event, triggering a manual disposition review at the end of the label's retention period, importing third-party data through native data connectors, discovering labeled content and monitoring labeling activity.' and 'automatically applying retention labels based on trainable classifiers'. I would also note that you need an E5 licence to keep a year's worth of audit logs (otherwise it's 90 days).

There may be some organisations that may want to make use of these options but I haven't seen a single use case that is based on the actual reality of managing records. If anything, it appears to be a way to cull records automatically - which you can do more accurately with standard retention policies. 

Incidentally, 'trainable classifiers' are not new - they've been around for close to 20 years in products like Recommind (now part of Open Text).

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?

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.

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 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.