Block deletion compliance policy and document version history limits

Brass Contributor

Seeking advice from the community prior to raising as an issue with Microsoft.

I have a SharePoint Online site collection where the owner only wants to retain 100 major versions of their files, and the versioning settings have been set up this way for the document library - i.e.  versioning is set to Create major and minor (draft) versions, and the "Keep drafts for following number of major versions" is set to 100.

Suffice it to say this setting is not working and documents still have all their versions retained despite many exceeding v 100.0

The only thing that I can think of that might be causing the versioning setting not to operate is the fact that the site also has a compliance policy that blocks deletion - i.e. everything kept forever.  Unfortunately, our organisation not mature enough in its use of Purview to have anything more granular in place.

I have searched online to see if there is any information about whether a compliance policy like this will prevent the version history settings from working and have so far haven't had any luck finding a definitive answer.

I was hoping a member of the community, or any Microsoft staff who might be monitoring this discussion board would be able to confirm that the compliance policy is basically overriding the version limit setting. 

Thanks in advance

Jenny 

1 Reply

@Jenny_Bruce Hi Jenny, have you tried to create a new site collection for testing purposes? 

  1. Create a new site collection
  2. Go to a document library and set the max versions to 3
  3. Add few files and edit them to have 5 versions 
  4. Add the site into the Retention policy - SharePoint exclusion list
  5. Change the Doc library to allow 2 versions. 
  6. Check if works. 
  7. Remove the site from the retention policy - SharePoint exclusion list.