M365 Changelog: Records Management–Announcing public preview of adaptive policy scopes for retention and label policies

MC280914 – Updated January 25, 2022: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

This new feature (preview), Adaptive policy scopes, will allow data administrators to scope retention policies and retention label policies to a dynamic set of users, SharePoint sites, or Microsoft 365 Groups. This is enabled by using the properties or attributes associated with these locations. Adaptive policy scopes work with all locations, including Exchange mailboxes, Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, Teams chats, channel messages (including private channels), and Yammer user and community messages.

• Before this release, admins had to manually manage what was included in each policy by creating multiple custom scripts to add or remove locations from a policy. Adaptive policy scopes will automatically add and remove applicable locations to a policy as properties change for the associated user, site, or group.
• Additionally, adaptive policy scopes are not subject to previous per-policy limits of only including 100 sites or 1000 mailboxes per policy which often caused duplicate policies in large organizations.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 70578.

When this will happen:

Public preview: will begin rolling out in mid-October (previously early September) and be complete by the end of October (previously mid-October).

Standard release: will begin rolling out in early February (previously mid-January) and be complete by early March (previously mid-February).

How this will affect your organization:

When this feature rolls out, Compliance administrators will be able to create adaptive scopes and apply one or more of these scopes to retention policies and retention label policies.

None of your existing policies will be affected by this feature. If you plan to replace the existing policies with new adaptive policies, Microsoft recommends creating the new adaptive policies before deleting the existing policies.

What you need to do to prepare:

There is nothing you need to do to receive this feature and it will not affect your existing policies. You may consider updating any training or reference material for your Compliance administrators and determining if you have policies which would benefit from using adaptive policy scopes.

Learn more:

If you are interested in using adaptive policy scopes as they are enabled in your tenant, Microsoft recommends watching the webinar where they announced the private preview of this feature.