Retention policy set on document library being overridden by retention property set inside some office documents (SharePoint Server 2019)

Question

We have a Site Collection level retention policy template set with a retention rule to move items to the recycle bin 10 days after the last modified date. When creating document libraries on the site, we apply the retention policy to the Document content type.

Some Office documents (not created in the same SharePoint farm) when uploaded to a document library in our site, seem to have a custom property defined in the document itself called "ItemRetentionFormula" which, for example, has a retention period of 2 years after last modified. So these documents don't get recycled in 10 days as desired. The retention formula defined at the document level seems to override the retention policy we have defined at the document library level.

Is there a way for us to force the document library level content type retention policy to take precedence over that set in the office document itself?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi @AISSB ,

Per my research, there are no relevant retention policy settings in Office documents.

Please create a test library, change the source to "Library and Folders", and upload those documents to check if they follow the library retention policy.

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Answer 2

Hi @JulieWang-MSFT ,

Thank you for your response. We have the 'library and folder based retention' feature disabled because we do not want the site collection level content type policies to be overridden at the library level. But I don't think that will resolve the issue:

This seems to be an issue copying files between different SharePoint farms where the source and target libraries have different retention policies and it only happens when using webDAV and the target farm is SharePoint 2019:

What we've observed is that if a file is copied to our SP2019 document library where the file originates from a library on another SharePoint farm (where there is a different retention policy), it seems that if the file is copied using Explorer View (webDAV) then our local retention policy seems to get overridden by the policy set in the foreign SharePoint library. If the same document is uploaded using the web controls (not using webDAV) then it works correctly and the local retention policy is applied.
This only seems to happen in our SharePoint 2019 environment - if I try the same in one of our SharePoint Online sites, this issue does not occur.
May be a bug in SharePoint 2019 only?

Answer 3

Hi @JulieWang-MSFT ,

I installed the March 2021 CU for SharePoint Server 2019 and I experience the same issue. Also, I just noticed that the problem also occurs if using the Upload -> Files toolbar buttons in the modern view (interestingly, the issue does not occur if using the upload link on the toolbar in classic view).