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Three Important Microsoft 365 Compliance Topics for SharePoint Online
Yesterday, I was at the European SharePoint Conference (ESPC) at the National Conference Center in Dublin. It’s always nice to have a chance to participate in an event in your hometown, and this was no different.
Paul Robichaux and I took on the challenge of speaking about some major recent changes inside Microsoft 365 that are of interest to compliance practitioners. Given the heavy SharePoint focus of the conference, it made sense to select Microsoft 365 compliance topics related to SharePoint Online. We selected:
- The introduction of intelligent versioning within SharePoint Online.
- Microsoft Purview Priority Cleanup for SharePoint Online and Exchange Online.
- The resigned Purview eDiscovery.
Intelligent Versioning
Intelligent versioning has been around for about 18 months now. It addresses the side effect of innovations like AutoSave and co-authoring for Office files that result in an explosion of file versions. The manual approach to managing file versions simply removes versions after a certain number of versions is accumulated. Intelligent versioning figures out which versions are needed for recovery and “trims” the other versions (deletes the files after a period). Intelligent versioning is also available for OneDrive for Business accounts.
Figure 1 is an example of intelligent versioning in action. Only three of the 16 versions shown for a Word document are marked as “never expires,” meaning that they are being kept for recovery. The other 13 versions are assigned dates when SharePoint believes it safe to delete the versions. Each version is 2.1 MB, so being able to remove 13 versions saves 27.3 MB out of the total 33.6 MB required for the full set.
Microsoft says that intelligent versioning can reduce the amount of storage used to keep versions by 94%. That sounds outlandish, but one of the attendees at our talk said that their tenant had saved hundreds of terabytes by implementing intelligent versioning. That was a great result, but it was only possible because retention policies didn’t apply to the sites that had intelligent versioning turned on. Retention is all about keeping files, so the desire of intelligent versioning to remove unwanted versions runs contrary to the need to keep data. The result is that intelligent versioning can mark versions for deletion, but no versions are ever removed.
Priority Cleanup
Purview Priority Cleanup is a solution to remove email and files even if those items are held for retention. There was a lot of interest in the room about Priority Cleanup, which is now generally available for SharePoint Online and in preview for Exchange Online. I’m working on an in-depth article about running Priority Cleanup for SharePoint Online, specifically to remove unwanted file versions stored in the preservation hold library.
Microsoft changed the way that SharePoint stores file versions in the preservation hold library in 2023 to adopt a more efficient mechanism. However, there’s a bunch of old files cluttering up preservation hold libraries that occupy valuable SharePoint storage (Figure 2). Removing old files that aren’t needed any longer from the preservation hold library has the dual benefit of releasing storage for better use and also eliminating some old and probably obsolete information that might otherwise be picked up by Microsoft 365 Copilot.
eDiscovery Revamp
Although Priority Cleanup can override retention holds, it cannot remove items that are subject to eDiscovery holds. In other words, an active eDiscovery case is in progress, and the item has been found and held as being of interest to the investigation. This brought us to the topic of the massive revamp Microsoft delivered for the Purview eDiscovery solution recently/
We didn’t have enough time to cover eDiscovery in any depth but chose to mention the topic to underline the two facts that Microsoft 365 technology changes all the time and a change made in one solution can affect or interact with other areas of the ecosystem.
Lots of Interest in Microsoft 365 Compliance
Going into the session, Paul and I thought that we’d be lucky if twenty people turned up because there were many other compelling sessions listed on the ESPC schedule for the same time. Instead, we had a full room with standing room only at the back. I guess we live in a world of increasing regulation and that interest shone through from our audience. Maybe we should have asked for a bigger room…
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