Microsoft 365 Records Management – Dynamically Assign Retention Labels with Adaptive Scopes

In October 2021, Microsoft announced a significant change in how retention labels could be applied to locations.  The concept for adaptive scopes is pretty straightforward, deploy labels or apply labels automatically based on some piece (or pieces) of metadata the system can scan for.  This means you can now dynamically assign retention labels with adaptive scopes to your SharePoint (including Teams), OneDrive, and Exchange locations without directly declaring them in the policy.

Why are Adaptive Scopes Important?

Adaptive scopes are essential for a number of reasons:

1. No need to update a label policy each time a site is added to ensure the correct labels are applied.
2. Adaptive scopes can be reused in multiple situations.
   1. Retention Label Policies
   2. Auto-Apply Policies
   3. Retention Policies
3. Adaptive scopes do not add to the policy threshold within the tenant.

Let’s chat a bit more about that last item.  Microsoft 365 does have a threshold on the number of policies that can be active in the tenant.  That number is 10,000.  Now that may seem like a large number of policies you would never hit, but it includes more than just retention.  The policy threshold includes the following:

• Retention label policies
• DLP Policies
• Information Barrier policies
• Exchange Retention Policies
• Litigation holds

When you consider all those items can be affected by the threshold and you have a large tenant, it may not be too difficult to hit the threshold.

The adaptive scope allows you to point retention labels at locations without creating a new policy.  You simply create your scope with the attributes needed to find the sites or mailboxes you need and create a policy that uses that scope.  This method will allow you to dynamically assigned retention labels with adaptive scopes to your various locations without any intervention from admins.

Dynamically Assign Retention Labels with Adaptive Scopes

There are a few steps required to dynamically assign retention labels with adaptive scopes in your environment.

1. Create at least one property bag for your site.
2. Make the property bag searchable via a search managed property
3. Create the adaptive scope
4. Point a retention label policy at the adaptive scope

You can review steps 1 and 2 above, as this was previously covered.  We’ll start with creating the adaptive scopes in this post.

Create an Adaptive Scope

An adaptive scope is an artifact within Microsoft 365 Purview.  This means that, like a label or an event type, you can create it and reference it from other components of Purview.  Before completing the following steps, ensure you first test your query with a content search.  For this example, we will use a query similar to “RefinableString05:Finance”

1. Navigate to the Data lifecycle management console
2. Click on the Adaptive scopes tab and click on “+ Create scope“
3. Provide a name and a description (optional) and click Next
4. On the Scope type page, select SharePoint Sites and click Next

5. Using either the Simple query builder or the Advanced Query Builder build the query you tested above.

6. Click Next.
7. Review your configuration and click next if everything looks good
8. Click done.

Create Label Policy with Adaptive Scope

The next and final step is to create a policy that will push labels to your environment based on the adaptive scope just created.

1. Navigate to the Data lifecycle management console
2. Click on the Label policies tab and click on Publish labels
3. Select the label(s) to publish and click Next.
4. On the retention policy type page select Adaptive and click Next

5. Click “+ Add scopes” and select the scope (you can select more than one for further refinement) required for the label(s)
6. Ensure the correct locations are enabled and click Next

7. Give the policy a meaningful name and a description (optional) and click Next
8. Review the configuration summary and click Submit

An adaptive scope retention label policy does not enable as quickly as a static label policy (the following screenshot shows it is still pending).  Keep checking the status of the policy to ensure it is successfully deployed.

Once the policy becomes active, give the system some time to push the label out to your sites.  The next screenshots illustrate the adaptive scope pushing the label to our finance site without actually selecting it.

Before the adaptive scope:

After the adaptive scope: