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.
Read more