I don’t usually blog about announcements as Microsoft does a great job, as do all of the others that share Microsoft posts, but this is big. Microsoft just added a considerable feature coming to your Microsoft 365 tenant in the near future. Integration of your information governance processes with Power Automate. Specifically, the integration of disposition reviews with Power Automate. Let’s chat about what that could mean to your organization.

Disclaimer: I don’t have any specific information to share that you can’t read in the roadmap blurb so take what I am providing with a grain of salt as the final product may be different than what I discussed in my post.

You may be wondering what the excitement is about. Microsoft just provided multi-stage disposition reviews last year. You’d be correct, and this was a good step in the right direction as it potentially allowed record managers and administrators to cut down on some of the overhead by assigning approvals directly to the approvers themselves. This meant record managers didn’t have to notify approvers when their data was up for disposition manually. The system did it for them. It allowed content approvers the same ability as record managers to approve or extend dispositions, relabel the document, or reassign the approval to someone else.

While this was a great feature, it could not fine-tune the disposition reviews based on the location of the data. Consider a label for projects. The label is quite general in that it can be for a project in any location within the organization. The problem is that content is not always treated as high-level as record labels must be. For some organizations, a content owner for one department cannot be allowed to see the content belonging to another department. Permissions can separate the data, but when disposition occurs in a multi-stage disposition, the potential is there for content owners assigned to a label to see at least the title of content they shouldn’t. If permissions are not configured properly, they could see more than just the title. Sometimes this potential is too high for some organizations, so they won’t use multi-stage disposition reviews. The only real way to get around this in a file plan allowing for multi-stage dispositions would be to create a label of the same type for each location (Dave’s Project Label, Brian’s Project Label, Sarah’s Project Label, etc.). If every label was created for a specific location or approver, your file plan would become completely unmanageable very fast. This is where I feel the integration of information governance and power platform will really help record managers.

Consider being able to fire off a power platform flow using the disposition of a document as the trigger action. That flow can then use whatever logic works for your organization to determine the approver based on the label and the location of the data. This can potentially allow for multiple stages of approvals as well. In addition, you now have the ability to create fully customizable communications since you are utilizing Power Automate. I imagine (though I can’t confirm) that you would also be able to provide approvers the same level of control of their data using Power Automate integration that they would have as a disposition approver. And they wouldn’t need access to the M365 Compliance Console to accomplish these tasks allowing that location to remain more secure within the environment.

Honestly, I think the use cases this one feature brings to the table provides the ability to complete so many distinct use cases in many organizations. I am truly excited about this feature.

Once the integration becomes available, I’ll create some posts on utilizing the new features.

Thanks for reading!