BUSINESS DATA GOVERNANCE & RETENTION WITH M365

At Usercompute, we believe that good data governance is essential for compliance, risk mitigation, and operational confidence. Microsoft 365 offers powerful tools—retention labels, retention policies, legal holds, and eDiscovery—to help organisations manage information securely and effectively.

1. Retention Labels & Retention Policies

• Retention Labels enable item-level classification (documents, emails), applied manually, automatically (by condition), or via auto-label rules.

• Retention Policies are applied at the container level—mailboxes, SharePoint sites, Teams—allowing content to be retained, deleted, or retained for a period, then deleted. 

• Using both gives flexibility: items you must preserve indefinitely, and others with defined lifecycles. 

2. Legal Holds & eDiscovery

• Litigation Holds preserve all mailbox content (including deleted and modified items), protecting content during investigations or legal requirements. 

• eDiscovery Holds allow preservation of content across multiple workloads (mailboxes, Teams, OneDrive) relevant to a legal or regulatory case. 

• Holds override retention policies where there is overlap—this ensures that data critical for legal compliance is not deleted. 

3. Best Practices to Balance Compliance & Productivity

• User Awareness: Educate your users about why these policies exist; it helps reduce accidental deletion or non-compliance.

• Flexible Rules: Apply stricter retention for regulated data, more lenient settings for everyday documents. Tailor labels and policies to different content types.

• Regular Policy Reviews: Laws, regulations, and business needs evolve. Review labels, policies, and holds periodically to stay aligned.