Getting Started With E-Discovery Center Template In SharePoint Online

Electronic Discovery or e-Discovery is the process of identifying documents which can be used as an evidence in legal cases. SharePoint Online has an e-Discovery site template, which helps to search for legitimate legal contents and place a hold on them until the legal formalities are completed. However you have to be a global administrator to place a hold on the document. The high level process involved in e-discovery is diagrammatically shown below.


Source: TechNet

Getting Started

In SharePoint Online, the e-Discovery center is created as a site collection. e-Discovery cases are created as subsites within the site collection. From the site collection, creation page in SharePoint Online, select ‘Private Site Collection”.


This will open up the page from where we can create site collection in SharePoint Online. Specify the below values for creating the site collection

  • Title Name of the e-Discovery site collection.
  • Web Site Address- It specifies the managed site path for the e-Discovery center.
  • Template Selection- Select e-Discovery Center site template from the 'Enterprise' tab.
  • Time Zone- Specify a time zone from the options in the time zone drop down list.
  • Administrator- Specify the site collection administrator of the e-Discovery Center site collection.
  • Storage Quota- Specify the size in MB that can be allocated to the e-Discovery Center site collection.


Once the values are filled, click OK to start the provisioning of the e-Discovery Center site collection. After a few minutes, the newly created site collection will be available in the list of site collections, as shown below.


By clicking on the URL, we can get to see the detailed information about the site collection, which was created recently.


Enter the URL in the Browser and go to the e-Discovery center site collection. We will get a welcoming introduction message on how to use the e-Discovery Center.


In order to create a new e-Discovery case, we can click Create new case button, which is available on the page.


This will open up a subsite creation page and a new subsite will be created under the e-Discovery root site collection.


Once the site is created, we can explore the entire feature set of the e-Discovery center. We can create an e-Discovery set, which will identify and preserve the required content. We can also place In-Place hold on the items such that the users can work on the documents without even knowing that a hold has been placed on it. The users can still work on the content, but a copy of the content at the time when the hold was initialized is preserved.


We will explore the step by step process of e-Discovery and In-Place Hold in an upcoming article.

Summary

Thus, we saw how to set up e-Discovery center and create a new case sub site within the e-Discovery site collection.