I was recently working on a pilot for a client that required auto-apply of retention labels. The client wanted to understand if Microsoft 365 could meet their needs for records retention and disposal. To assist we set up your standard assortment of retention labels and policies such as auto-delete, disposition reviews, etc. One of the requirements was to configure auto-apply labels to decrease the level of involvement required by users. In their current record management system, they were configuring retention at the folder level. While this can certainly be accomplished with SharePoint Online, I strongly encouraged them to process auto-apply labels based on metadata instead. So one of our pilot configurations was to create a couple of auto-apply policies that applied labels based on a site column value. We created the policies, added content, set the metadata, and waited. Microsoft states it will take a little time for the labels to apply. I suggested a week, but by the second week, we still didn’t have any labels being applied automatically. I confirmed the queries were configured correctly (I’ll cover this in my next post), but in the end, we had to admit the auto-apply retention label policies were not functioning.
In previous posts, I discussed creating retention labels and publishing them to your various sites. This is an effective way to ensure record retention processes are followed within your organization. However, the process can require a lot of user interaction. Many organizations find their users do not apply labels. The reasons for this range from being unsure which option to select to not having time to do it. This can cause records to be deleted before they should or kept longer than required. In this post, we’ll help to alleviate that by using an auto-apply retention label policy. It’s a bit of a longer post, but there can be many parts to properly configuring auto-apply retention labels.
In my previous post, I discussed configuring site sensitivity using Microsoft 365 MIP (Microsoft Information Protection) labels. In this follow-up, I’ll discuss site sensitivity label alerts, what is there automatically and what you need to configure.
Previously I provided instructions on how to create a sensitivity label scoped to your sites and groups. In this short post, I’ll demonstrate how one apply sensitivity labels to sites, Groups, and Teams in Microsoft 365. I’ll present the before and after effects that applying the sensitivity label has on your sites. I’ll also show you how site sensitivity labels can help ensure content that isn’t supposed to be within the site is flagged automatically for you.
Creating a sensitivity label for Groups and Sites is a relatively new feature within Microsoft 365 compliance. This feature allows sensitivity control to be applied to features in M365 that are backed by a Microsoft 365 Group (Teams and SharePoint sites) and SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Currently, the feature is not enabled by default. It needs to be enabled. Check out “Enable Sensitivity Labels in Microsoft 365 Groups and SharePoint Sites“. In this post, I’ll cover the steps for applying a sensitivity label to a site itself.