About a month ago Microsoft posted an update in the Message Centre related to the change in how retention label policies work with SharePoint group-connected sites (MC405572 · Published 25 Jul 2022 in our Tenant). This change may require Compliance Administrators to take action and update their policy so I thought I’ll flag it up in my blog.
The change rollout will start in mid-August, to be completed at the end of August; the Administrators should start seeing the effects of the change this month.
Microsoft provided the following summary of the change:
“In order to improve the consistency of how retention labels and policies work in SharePoint sites, going forward retention labels published to a group-connected SharePoint site will require the retention label publish policy to select the “Microsoft 365 Groups” location. Once this change rolls out, only those retention labels published to “Microsoft 365 Groups” locations will appear within the dropdown selection menu for the corresponding group-connected sites.“
Source – Microsoft 365 Message Centre
There is at least one scenario where retention policies will have to be re-published. This is when labels were published to a SharePoint site upgraded to group connected (or Team connected) site after the initial labels publish. Fortunately, according to Microsoft, all files already labelled with retention label should not be affected:
“Retention labels already configured as default for document libraries and folders will not be impacted by this change and will continue to be applied as default to items per the current behavior. Items already labeled previously by this default are not affected and will continue to be labeled. When the default label is changed, only labels published to the site will be available to be selected.
Retention labels that are already applied to items within these sites will continue to stay applied, even if they are not published to the site, and are not impacted by this change.“
Source – Microsoft 365 Message Centre
We have discovered a few anomalies with published labels, speaking with some of our clients, labels have disappeared despite the fact they have been published to “Microsoft 365 Groups” and correct groups were selected. At the time of writing, those are being investigated, I’ll update this blog when we have more details around the cause and the potential fix. Re-publishing the labels did not have any effect.
We have also noticed that when publishing the labels, there is now an option to select a group-connected SharePoint site using “SharePoint sites”. Previously, only stand-alone (non-group connected) sites could be targeted using this option.
To summarise, there may be an action required to re-enable retention labels on specific types of SharePoint sites either via new label policy or an update to an existing policy. Compliance Administrators should re-evaluate their policies and act accordingly.
If you would like to discuss how risual can help you to implement information lifecycle management or have any questions about Microsoft 365 get in touch today.
Thanks for reading and I hope that has been useful for you!
