Introduction
The different Microsoft 365 locations, such as Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint document libraries, are repositories of valuable data. They're a common medium for communication and collaboration between information workers in organizations of all sizes. As a best practice, an organization should establish policies to control the life cycle of all messaging data and content that it saves across the following locations:
- Exchange email
- SharePoint sites
- OneDrive accounts
- Microsoft 365 groups
- Skype for Business
- Exchange public folders
- Teams channel messages
- Teams chats
- Teams private channel messages
- Yammer community messages
- Yammer user messages
For example, even with good data governance, SharePoint sites can proliferate and grow out of control. Organizations create sites when needed, but they rarely delete sites. If organizations retain sites even when they don't need them anymore, they require storage space and they may be unwanted for compliance reasons.
Organizations manage deletion and preservation of data across the different Microsoft 365 services by using retention policies and retention labels. They can use just one of these methods, or they can combine them together.
This module explores how organizations can effectively manage or govern this information by using retention policies and retention label policies. You examine the capabilities found in each method, and you learn how policies differ depending on their scope.
The module then reviews the principles of retention. These principles come into play when an item is subject to multiple retention settings that conflict with one another. When this situation occurs, you learn what takes precedence to determine the outcome.
The module concludes by examining how organizations use Preservation Lock. It explores how this feature restricts users and administrators from turning off policies, deleting policies, and making policies less restrictive.