Retention

No Data Compromised but Bad Day for Teams Retention Alarm bells went off on Thursday, October 29 when administrators in several tenants noticed that retention policies created to process Teams chat messages were apparently applied to Exchange mailboxes. Microsoft subsequently issued incident EX225368 “Admins may see Microsoft Teams retention policies unexpectedly update to Exchange Online…

With GDPR coming, it’s good news that Teams now supports Office 365 retention policies. You can apply retention to messages posted to channels and chats, or use a mixture of policies to target different sets of users and teams. You might be surprised how Teams has implemented retention – and remember, we’re only talking about messages – other content might also need a policy.

The new Office 365 data governance framework has been updated to allow content marked with classification labels to receive a manual review before being removed. It’s the kind of thing that makes data governance administrators happy.

The European Union will introduce the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in May 2018. The intention is to deliver better protection for personal data, which is laudable. Like with many regulations, the problems arise in implementation. Office 365 holds a lot of personal data, so Office 365 tenants must cope with GDPR.

Microsoft extends the Office 365 data governance framework to cover conversations in Teams. Office 365 captures chats as items in Exchange Online mailboxes that are discoverable with content searches. And audit events work too!

As part of the Office 365 data governance framework, tenants can now create retention policies that apply to the mailbox and team site belonging to Office 365 Groups. The process is quite straightforward, but some gotchas exist that you need to think about!

Office 365 now boasts a new data governance framework to provide compliance coverage across multiple workloads. The new framework covers Exchange, SharePoint OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business, and Office 365 Groups. It is a big step forward for tenants that have been waiting for Microsoft to deliver common compliance processing across the full service.