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.
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.