Microsoft Releases Cmdlet to Retrieve Disposition Review Items

Export Details of Disposition Review Items

Message Center notification MC521457 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 106102) might have passed you buy on February 27 when Microsoft announced a new PowerShell cmdlet for disposition review. Relatively few people are concerned with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management to care that a new cmdlet is available to export (not just “to support”) disposition review items, so it’s entirely natural that you might have gone on to read about other announcements occurring around the same time, like Exchange Online’s improved message recall feature.

Roll-out of the new Get-ReviewItems cmdlet is now complete. The cmdlet is available after loading the latest version of the Exchange Online management module.

Disposition Items

Microsoft 365 retention labels often result in the deletion of items after the lapse of their retention periods. This is enough for most organizations, but those that want oversight over the final processing of selected items can configure retention labels to invoke a disposition review, part of the Microsoft Purview records management solution. Disposition reviews are often used to retain messages and documentations such as those for project documentation until the organization is absolutely sure that it’s safe to remove individual items.

Using a disposition review with retention labels requires advanced licenses, like Office 365 E5. An organization can put items through a single-stage or multi-stage review (Figure1) leading to final deletion, retention for another period, or assignment of a new retention label. The reviewers who decide on the disposition of content are selected by the organization because they have the expertise and experience to know if items are still needed or can progress to final disposition. It’s also possible to configure a custom automated disposition process using Power Automate.

Exporting Disposition Review Items

The Get-ReviewItems cmdlet doesn’t affect disposition outcomes. It’s a utility cmdlet to export details of disposition review items for a specific retention label in a pending or disposed (processed) state. The reason why the cmdlet exists is that the Purview GUI (Figure 1) supports export of up to 50,000 items. Although it’s unlikely that an organization will have more than 50,000 items awaiting disposition review, it is possible that they might have more than 50,000 disposed (processed) items. The Get-ReviewItems cmdlet can export details of all those items.

Microsoft’s documentation for Get-ReviewItems includes examples of using the cmdlet. One in particular is noteworthy because it explains how to fetch pages of review items until all items have been recovered. Fetching pages of data is common practice in the Graph API world and it’s done to reduce the strain on the service imposed if administrators requested very large numbers of items at one time.

I expanded the example to create a report of all disposition review items for a tenant (all items for all retention labels with a disposition review). Here’s the code:

Connect-IPPSSession

[array]$ReviewTags = Get-ComplianceTag | Where-Object {$_.IsReviewTag -eq $True} | Sort-Object Name
If (!($ReviewTags)) { Write-Host "No retention tags with manual disposition found - exiting"; break }

Write-Host ("Looking for Review Items for {0} retention tags: {1}" -f $ReviewTags.count, ($ReviewTags.Name -join ", "))

$Report = [System.Collections.Generic.List[Object]]::new() 

[array]$ItemsForReport = $Null
ForEach ($ReviewTag in $ReviewTags) {
 Write-Host ("Processing disposition items for the {0} label" -f $ReviewTag.Name)
 [array]$ItemDetails = $Null; [array]$ItemDetailsExport = $Null
 # Fetch first page of review items for the tag and extract the items to an array
 [array]$ReviewItems = Get-ReviewItems -TargetLabelId $ReviewTag.ImmutableId -IncludeHeaders $True -Disposed $False  
 $ItemDetails += $ReviewItems.ExportItems
 # If more pages of data are available, fetch them and add to the Item details array
 While (![string]::IsNullOrEmpty($ReviewItems.PaginationCookie))
 {
    $ReviewItems = Get-ReviewItems -TargetLabelId $ReviewTag.ImmutableId -IncludeHeaders $True -PagingCookie $ReviewItems.PaginationCookie
    $ItemDetails += $ReviewItems.ExportItems
 }
 # Convert data from CSV
 If ($ItemDetails) {
   [array]$ItemDetailsExport = $ItemDetails | ConvertFrom-Csv -Header $ReviewItems.Headers 
   ForEach ($Item in $ItemDetailsExport) {
     # Sometimes the data doesn't include the label name, so we add the label name to be sure
     $Item | Add-Member -NotePropertyName Label -NotePropertyValue $ReviewTag.Name }
   $ItemsForReport += $ItemDetailsExport
 }
}

ForEach ($Record in $ItemsForReport) {
  If ($Record.ItemCreationTime) {
   $RecordCreationDate =  Get-Date($Record.ItemCreationTime) -format g 
  } Else {
   $RecordCreationDate = "Unknown" }
 
   $DataLine  = [PSCustomObject] @{
     TimeStamp       = $RecordCreationDate
     Subject         = $Record.Subject
     Label           = $Record.Label
     AppliedBy       = $Record.LabelAppliedBy
     RecordType      = $Record.RecordType
     'Last Reviewed' = Get-Date($Record.ItemLastModifiedTime) -format g
     'Review Action' = $Record.ReviewAction
     Comment         = $Record.Comment
     'Deleted Date'  = $Record.DeletedDate
     Author          = $Record.Author
     Link            = $Record.InternetMessageId
     Location        = $Record.Location
   } 
   $Report.Add($DataLine)
}

Everything works – until you meet an item with a comma in its subject or the comment captured when a reviewer decides upon a disposition outcome. After discussing the issue with Microsoft, its root cause is that the export is in CSV format and the comma in these fields causes problems when converting from CSV format. Microsoft is working on a fix which might be present as you read this.

The Lesson of Export

The Get-ReviewItems cmdlet will be a useful tool for those involved in disposition processing. They can extract details of items and report that information in whatever way they wish. The comma issue proves that documentation is not always perfect. It’s important to test examples to make sure that they work as they should.

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