Previously I showed you how to use Power Automate to build a simple custom workflow to handle your disposition processes for you. It allowed you to provide custom messages and any other non-standard activities your organization required. In this presentation, I will take it a bit further now and automatically perform a step that a record manager would have to do manually. Request site owners’ approval to dispose of content. This flow targets site owners as they tend to be content owners as well. Just a quick caveat. The steps outlined here will only work with a Microsoft 365 group. It will not work with a non-grouped site. I’ll cover that in the future. So let’s dig in on how to assign the disposition of a record to Microsoft 365 Site Owners.
Some time ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on disposition reviews. I covered the standard disposition reviews and the multi-stage disposition review. In records management, disposition reviews allow content SMEs, owners, and\or record managers to review content to ensure it is no longer viable before it is ultimately destroyed. Recently, Microsoft released an update to Microsoft Purview that allows an organization to create Power Automate disposition reviews. This means that when a document reaches the completion of its retention schedule, instead of a standard disposition review being initiated, a Power Automate flow is started instead. This vastly increases the options available to record managers or administrators in handling their content.
Previously I provided an overview of why Power Automate disposition reviews are important to record management tasks for many organizations. With the introduction aside, let’s cover how to create a Power Automate disposition review from concept to execution. This process will create a custom message to the disposition reviewer. If approved it will delete the document and update a destruction tracker list in SharePoint. If rejected, the record manager will be notified to take necessary action.
Record management capabilities within Microsoft Purview have vastly improved over the last few years. With features such as adaptive scopes, auto-apply retention capabilities, and much more, the ability to apply different techniques to your record management needs is vastly growing. Throughout all of these features and enhancements, the foundation of records management in Microsoft 365 is based on one real component: the record label. Now before all of you get upset and rage close this blog post, I am not saying retention policies, retention label policies, or other components aren’t important. They all have their place for information governance in Microsoft 365. But record labels have all the real options and where all the real record management magic happens. In this series, I am going to do a deep dive into the different Microsoft Purview retention label types. What the differences are, the options available to you as administrators or record managers, and how they can be used within your organization.