SharePoint features with mixed licensing.

Question

Client currently has Business Premium licensing. Much to my chagrin premium doesn't allow for retention policies and litigation hold in SharePoint! Please correct me if I'm wrong. Premium allows for that in Exchange online. Why Microsoft?

Its my understanding that an E3 license is required to use those features in SharePoint.

My question is, would this require all SharePoint users to switch to E3? I'm not thrilled by the prospect of replacing Premium due to the better security features like CA, and Intune.

Is there a better option.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Dear Kryptonian_044,

Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are happy to help you.

Based on this article

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/microsoft-365-service-descriptions/microsoft-365-tenantlevel-services-licensing-guidance/microsoft-365-security-compliance-licensing-guidance,

it seems Business Premium also provided retention policy function.

And retention policy is applied on the site level, but not user level. After policy take effect, any changes or deletion happened on the site which is hold by policy will have a file copy to help retention the files, no matter who is the user edit it or delete it. So it does not require all the users have the required license. But only the user who setup retention policy should have the required license.

You can enable it from https://compliance.microsoft.com/informationgovernance?viewid=retention.

To setup policy on SPO or OneDrive, you can create a new policy from this page

After submit it, please wait for 24 hours for it taking effect.

To learn more about retention policy on SharePoint and OneDrive, you can refer to this article:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/retention-policies-sharepoint#how-retention-works-for-sharepoint-and-onedrive 

Have a nice day!

Best regards,