Configure Data Management On The Security and Compliance Center On SharePoint Office 365

Welcome to an article on how to configure data management on the security and compliance center on SharePoint Office 365.

You can configure retention policy and online archiving of your data present on Office 365.

If you are a tenant administrator, open your Office portal and click on “Security and Compliance”.



You will reach your security and compliance center.



We have here:

Data management


Retention Policy

Retention policy is necessary for all the organizations as per their data management. It helps you to delete or preserve the data with the constraint of time in the company.



As you can see from the screen above, we have the following ways to manage the retention.

  1. Manage retention tags for mailboxes

    Here, you can manage the tags on the mailboxes to apply retention. The items that are specified will be used for the retention policy.



    You can apply the retention policy to the entire mailbox or to a default folder applied by the users to the items and folders.



    If you want to add a new policy, click “+” on the view, as the screen shown above.



    • Name
      Provide a name

    • Retention action
      Choose an action if you want to delete or allow the recovery, when this tag is found or permanently deleted or moved to the archive.

    • Retention Period
      You can set a time period, stating the duration of time the retention should be applied.

    • Comments
      You can provide your comments here.

    Once you've configured your retention tags for mailboxes, your policy will work as expected.

  2. Manage retention policies for mailboxes

    Here you can manage the retention policy for your mail boxes on Office 365.



    You can assign the retention policy directly to the mail box from the options, given below on the time lines, as per the screenshot given below:



    Timeline Options are:



    You can also add the tags along with the policy for both to work together.

  3. Assign retention policies to mailboxes

    Here, you can assign your custom retention policy to your mail box. This will allow you to assign multiple retention policies to your mail box on your tenant.



  4. Manage document deletion policies for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

    This allows you to manage the retention policy of deleting the documents within the site collection on OneDrive, based on their retention rules or the time interval.



    You can provide a name and a description to the policy and set rules, by clicking “+ New”.

    It will open the screen, shown below:



    You can specify the deletion rule here.

    • Name
      Provide a name to the rule.

    • Delete action
      Choose whether you want to delete from the recycle bin or permanently delete the documents, after the retention period is met.

    • Field Value
      Choose the field value from which it should calculate.

    • Time period
      Specify the time period when the criteria met should delete the document.

Preserve

You can preserve the documents, mails or other information by specifying the preserve policy.

  • Provide a name and a description to your preserve policy.



  • Choose any or all of them to preserve the data from a mailbox or SharePoint or OneDrive or all public folders.

Mailboxes



If you choose mail box, add the mail box you want your policy to apply to by clicking on the “+” option.

SharePoint




If you choose SharePoint, add the site you want your policy to apply to by clicking on the “+” option.

Folders



If you choose folders, add the keywords you want your policy to look for and you can provide the start and end dates to specify the search in that period.

  • Once done, choose a time frame for the policy.



  • You can lock down your policy to make any changes which will be made by only the creator of this policy and nobody else.



  • Here, you can decide when you want to apply the policy.



  • After all the steps given above, you can review your policy once and click ‘Create’ for the new preservation policy to be created on your admin center.

Online Archiving

Online archiving helps to provide more space to the users on the mail box, such as when you enable the online archiving; it moves the email two years old to the archive; thereby leaving more space on the current mail box, but storing all the valuable old emails under a different section.



As per the screenshot shown above, you just have to click enable and the archiving for all the items on your mailbox for more than two years will be automatically archived.

Here, in this article, we saw two important configurations under the data management on the security and compliance, which were retention and online archiving, which are the important aspects of data policies. There is always more to learn. Hence, keep reading and keep learning!