Security, Compliance, and Identity Blog

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Become a Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management Ninja

Microsoft

Jul 25, 2023

Welcome to the Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management ninja training! This page shares the top training resources for you to build your expertise.

What is Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management?

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and Microsoft Purview Records Management help to govern your Microsoft 365 data for compliance or regulatory requirements.

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management manages risk and liability by only keeping what you need and deleting what you don’t across your entire digital estate, whereas Records Management manages high value content following the specialized workflows required to meet legal, business, or regulatory recordkeeping obligations.

Simplify the lifecycle of sensitive data (Blog)
Simplify the lifecycle of sensitive data (video)
Manage information protection and governance (Learning path)
Govern your data with Microsoft Purview (Docs)
Deploy a data governance solution (Docs)

Getting Started

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management retains and deletes data. It manages content where users collaborate to prevent productivity loss and reduce risks with defensible disposal and rich audit trails. Learn about how to get started below.

Solution Guide

Do you need some inspiration? Check out these customer success stories.

Which license and permissions do I need for Data Lifecycle and Records Management?

Trials and setup guide

Retain and delete your data

How long to retain data and when to delete them is important, as keeping data longer or shorter than your business, legal, or regulatory requirements can cause you to be noncompliant. With Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management, you can apply retention policies and retention labels to locations across Microsoft 365 to keep your data compliant.

Retention Policies

Retention Labels
- Learn about retention labels (Docs)
- Use file plan to manage retention labels (Docs)
- Use retention label policies to publish retention labels (Docs)
- Understand locations where you can publish retention labels (Docs)
- You can only use one retention label at a time (Docs)
- Use retention labels to manage a SharePoint document lifecycle (Docs)

Better together: use both Retention policies and Retention labels

Principles of retention

How retention and deletion work in:

Scenario highlight: what happens to user’s content when they leave the organization?
- User’s interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot (Docs)
- User’s content in SharePoint and OneDrive (Docs)
- User’s content in Exchange (emails) (Docs)
- User’s content in Microsoft Teams (Docs)
- User’s content in Viva Engage (Docs)

Other retention settings

Other uses for retention labels

Other than applying retention and deletion to content with retention labels, you can also use retention labels to:

Use file plan to create and manage your retention labels

After you've decided to use retention labels to help you keep or delete files and emails in Microsoft 365, you might have realized that you have many and possibly hundreds of retention labels to create and publish.

Learn about how to use the file plan to bulk create and manage your retention labels.

Use file plan to manage retention labels (Docs)
How to access the file plan (Docs)
How to navigate your file plan (Docs)
Export all retention labels to analyze or enable offline reviews (Docs)
Import retention labels into your file plan (Docs)
Information about the label properties for import (Docs)
Understanding the file plan descriptors columns (Docs)

Other ways to create and manage your retention labels

Although the recommended method to create retention labels at scale is by using the file plan from the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, you can also choose to use PowerShell and Graph API.

Trigger retention based on an event

Many times, retention is triggered not based the age of the content, but when a specific event occurs, such as when an employee departs, a contract expires, or when a project closes, learn about how to use event triggered retention to manage content across your organization related to the same employee, contract, or project.

Start retention when an event occurs (Docs)

Record retention label vs. Regulatory retention label

You can use retention labels to mark items as a record, or a regulatory record.

Learn about Records (Docs)

The difference between retention labels, and retention labels that mark an item as a record or regulatory record, are explained below:

Compare restrictions for what actions are allowed or blocked (Docs)

By using retention labels to mark items as a record, you can implement a single and consistent strategy for managing immutable files across your Microsoft 365 environment.

Automatically apply a retention label to retain or delete content

One of the most powerful features of retention labels is the ability to apply them automatically to content that matches specified conditions. In this case, people in your organization don't need to apply the retention labels, Microsoft 365 does the work for them.

Automatically apply a retention label to Microsoft 365 items (Docs)

You can automatically apply a retention label using:

Keywords or searchable properties (Docs)
- Auto Apply Retention Labels in Office 365 Using Content Types and Metadata | Microsoft Learn
Specific types of sensitive information (Docs)
Trainable classifiers (Docs)
Cloud attachments (Docs)
- Find and retain cloud attachments with Microsoft Purview (Webinar)
Microsoft 365 compliance connectors (Docs)
Microsoft Syntex (Docs)

Before you auto-apply your retention label to content, you can also use simulation mode for Data Lifecycle and Records Management to simulate the results as if the auto-labeling policy had applied your selected label, using the conditions that you defined. You can then refine your conditions for accuracy if needed and rerun the simulation.

Learn about simulation mode (Docs)
Simulation mode for retention labels (Blog)

Targeted retention to users, groups, and sites using adaptive scopes

Have you always wanted to apply retention dynamically based on common attributes and properties, rather than choosing specific users, groups, and sites and having to manually update them they change over time? Then adaptive scope is what you are looking for!

Scope the administration of Data Lifecycle Management

Microsoft Purview Data lifecycle management supports administrative units that have been configured in Azure Active Directory.

Learn about administrative units for Data Lifecycle and Records Management (Docs)

Customize what happens at the end of the retention period

When you configure a retention label to retain items for a specific period, you can specify what action to take at the end of that retention period.

You can choose from the built-in actions of permanently deleting the item, relabeling the item to a different retention label, deactivating the label, starting a disposition review, or running a Power Automate flow.

Customize what happens at the end of the retention period (Docs)

Review and manage the disposition of your records

Disposition review ensures that the correct retention has been applied to the content, and to identify if there are reasons to suspend the deletion due to litigation or that the content should be archived and retained instead.

Announcing Multi-Stage Disposition in Microsoft Records Management (Blog)
Disposition of content (Docs)
Learn about disposition reviews (Docs)
Prerequisites for viewing content dispositions (Docs)
Workflow for a disposition review (Docs)
Auto-approval for disposition (Docs)
How to configure a retention label for disposition review (Docs)
How to customize email messages for disposition review (Docs)
Viewing and disposing of content (Docs)
Disposition of records (Docs)

Running a Power Automate flow at the end of the retention period

If you choose to run a Power Automate flow at the end of the retention period, you can customize notifications and approval processes.

Monitoring your retention labels and activities

After you have deployed your retention policies and retention labels, you can use the built in content explorer and activity explorer to monitor and understand retention activities.

Monitoring retention labels (Docs)
sing Content Search to find all content with a specific retention label (Docs)
Policy Lookup (Docs)
Auditing retention configuration and actions (Docs)

When to use retention policies and retention labels instead of older features

If you need to proactively retain or delete content in Microsoft 365 for data lifecycle management, we recommend that you use Microsoft 365 retention policies and retention labels instead of the following older features.

Integration with Microsoft Syntex

Microsoft Syntex is a set of AI-powered cloud content management services. Microsoft Syntex puts content to work – optimizing your business processes and managing your content better. With Microsoft Syntex, you can apply retention labels to the documents that your models identify.

What’s next?

Now that you know about Data Lifecycle and Records Management, take the SC-400 exam to become a certified Microsoft Information Protection Administrator.