Document Lifecycle Management Essentials

Before you start creating or migrating anything else in terms of content, check these out first so that your content is properly managed.

Purview is the backbone of M365 and controls many aspects of the platform. As an extension, it also controls many aspects when it comes to managing content and files stored on the platform. Your files live on SharePoint or Teams or OneDrive. But Purview controls how these are kept, managed and ultimately disposed.

Make sure you adjust these settings on day one since Microsoft is notorious for not fixing backward which means that any setting changes made only apply from this moment onwards.
In terms of managing content and documents, the Data Lifecycle Management area will be the most important location on Purview. This menu can be found on the left hand side bar, and if not, then click on the Apps to locate and pin it.

Data Lifecycle Management

data lifecycle management, purview, retention labels, classifiers, trainable classifiers, explorers,
data lifecycle management, purview, retention labels, classifiers, trainable classifiers, explorers,
  • Retention labels Creates and publish document labels which will be covered in a separate article. Pair these up with your retention policies to match labels to disposition policies for greater control over your content.

  • Policies This is where retention and disposition policies are created and maintained. The created policies can be used to help decide on what to do with content after set dates or events have transpired. For example, you might want to automatically delete all emails from Outlook that are older than 20 years from the "sent" date, or more commonly, you want to automatically delete files from SharePoint that are older than your maximum retention date, say 10 years. You can have multiple policies for different parts of M365, as well as multiple policies for one platform.

  • Classifiers Predominately for setting up of Trainable Classifiers and Sensitive Info types which applies automation to identifying and classification of files.. These will be covered in another article for a wider explanation. But basically, you can train up the system to look out for specific content or keywords and then decide how to want that content to be treated. Very powerful, but may be foreshadowed at a later date by the more modern and easier to use Microsoft Syntex.

  • Explorers Very useful dashboards for getting an overview of data tagging, classifications and policy activities. Tells you how well (or not well) your settings are doing and how many tags and labels have been applied. Useful in combination with retention activities, measuring content risk with sensitivity labels.
We are ignoring some of the other menu items as they either have limited value or are in Preview, which means that Microsoft has this in Trial mode and the functionality can changed or removed at any time.
eDiscovery performs some seriously powerful searches and this function is generally reserved for investigative or audit functions with an organisation. This is because cases are able to interrogate ALL aspects of M365, profiles, content, data and activity across the tenant.

  • Cases Creates and run powerful content searches across the tenant. You can run simultaneous cases across content and have these run in the background as some retrievals can take a long time.

  • Content Search Run search cases across the tenant or for specific platforms, sites and locations. These can include locations like private chat on Teams, preservation hold libraries, recycle bin, and even into previously purged deleted items (to a certain extent). Possibly a bit too powerful for the average user, so best left used by auditors or investigators.

  • Dashboards Process and hold reports which are outputs from the case and content search runs.

eDiscovery

data lifecycle management, purview, retention labels, classifiers, trainable classifiers, explorers,
data lifecycle management, purview, retention labels, classifiers, trainable classifiers, explorers,
More policy settings and configurations for protecting data and information on the tenant. Key controls are below, but will be expanded in other articles (otherwise this will be VERY long)

  • Sensitivity Labels Defining, setting and prioritizing of sensitivity labels which will impact content across the areas applied to. Definitely important to get right.

    Policies This is where we can apply auto-classification labels on documents, as well as define label and protection policies.

  • Classifiers Where we can setup and test trainable classifiers and look at EDM policies

Again, we are going to ignore some of the other menu items as they either have limited value.

Information Protection

data lifecycle management, purview, retention labels, classifiers, trainable classifiers, explorers,
data lifecycle management, purview, retention labels, classifiers, trainable classifiers, explorers,