4. Implementing In-Place Records Management in Microsoft SharePoint
Let’s take a look now at how Records management affects SharePoint. First thing you need to do is have a SharePoint site. So let’s start on Portal Microsoft. com. We’re going to click show. All we’re going to go down to SharePoint. It’s going to bring us into the SharePoint admin center. All right? Then you’re just going to go over here to Sites and click Active Sites and you will create a site. Okay, we’re going to make this a team site. All right? And you can of course name the site anything you want. Perhaps this particular site is going to be involving research and development. All right, so give it a name, specify who your owner is going to be.
Make sure the owner has SharePoint license, which of course for the most part most of your office in Microsoft 365, you’re going to have it so it’s not going to be a problem. You can also specify some advanced settings. Like if you want to associate some sensitivity labels that have been created, you could, you can make it private, which we are going to make this private. You can specify your time zone. Okay, I’m going to click Next and if I have additional owners, I can go ahead and specify who those additional owners are. If I want to add some additional members, I could go ahead and do that. But I’m going to go ahead and click Finish and this is going to take some time to create that.
It will also create a team as well as a Microsoft 365 Group, which I would also like to add. You could have gone the other route and done this through Teams or Microsoft 365 Groups and you can create the SharePoint site that way. All right. Now let me also warn you that especially with a trial tenant, this can take time before this is actually available for use. Okay? So like for example, if a user goes to WWW. OFFICE. COM and then goes right here and clicks on the waffle, this little symbol and clicks on SharePoint SharePoint site does not always show up immediately. This takes time. So you’re going to give that some time. You’ll need to give it a bit of time before it’s going to appear.
The other thing is we now can officially go over to Records Management in our compliance center. So we’re going to go to Portal Microsoft. com. We’re going to go to the Compliance Blade. All right. I have a habit of going here. Of course you can type Compliance Microsoft. com and just go straight into Compliance. All right. I kind of like having a portal that takes me to most of the other portals, so I tend to go to that portal instead. But it gets you to the same place, compliance Microsoft. com. Then we’re going to go to down here towards the bottom. We’re going to click on records management. All right. If we want we could create a record specifically for research and development.
So we’ll say create a record, and we’ll just call this research and development. All right? And we’ll click next. All right, give it the business function. We have all these different options here. We could add another, right? So research and development. There we go. Click Next. And there you go. I think I typed it, but that’s okay. From there, we can specify the category. All right, if we don’t have the category we are looking for, we can select it and we can add one. I mean, we’ll click choose. All right, subcategory. If we want to have a subcategory, we can create those authority type. We’re going to say business and then provision citation. I could specify whatever I want here.
All right? So in my case, I’m just going to leave that alone. I’m going to click Next and then it’s business as usual. We have the retention and all that. I’m going to say mark item as a record, and I’m going to say do nothing. I don’t want it to be deleted. So I’m going to click Next and create the label. And then we’ve got to publish the label. Okay, so we’ll say publish the label. And now, granted, don’t forget, you can always say do nothing and then come back in and publish it using the other tab. But I’m going to go ahead and publish it’s. Going to bring up the publishing wizard. Click Next. We’re going to say, let me choose. And then if I just want to do SharePoint, I can.
If I want to edit and choose a specific site, I can. Now, again, let me warn you that this can take a while before your SharePoint sites are ever going to show up here. It can take over 24 hours with a trial tenant. So if you click edit and you don’t see your site, you got to give it some time. All right, so I’m going to click Next, give it a name. I’ll just call it R and the policy and click Next. And there you go. We’re going to click to submit. As always. Again, I know I sound like a broken record. You got to give it time. It could take an hour, 24 hours before this label is even going to be available in your environment. But that’s how you can apply these records management labels just to SharePoint.
5. Managing Disposition of Records
Now one of the final things you have to consider when working with retention labels, records management in your Microsoft 365 environment is the concept of disposition reviews. Now a disposition review is going to make it where instead of deleting a piece of information, a document, that information will be sent to a manager, manager or administrator or some user that’s got to make a decision. In fact, it can actually be sent to multiple people and happen in stages, which I’ll show you in just a moment. But ultimately the goal is to decide do I want to suspend the document for deletion? Maybe I’m going to suspend it and not have it deleted because we’ve got to keep it for litigation or auditing reasons. Another thing is I could assign a different retention period.
So instead of maybe the document is seven years old, I could change the retention period to another time and then I could also move the content from its existing location somewhere else or I could choose to archive it. Ultimately I have a choice to have a decision to make. I have to decide am I going to delete it, am I going to move it, am I going to extend the date? These are the things that somebody who is dealing with the disposition review can make a choice of. And of course I can also move it down the line in again stages so I can approve this to maybe go to the next stage where another person would make a decision and it can continue to go down to other people until finally it’s approved down the line and then eventually it is removed.
So it might be that I’m a junior level manager or something and everything goes through me first for disposition and then if I approve it, it goes to the next level which is a more senior manager and so on and so forth. And these people can decide to get rid of it based on their decision on what they think is best for that particular information. But let’s take a look at how we can do this. Here we are on portal Microsoft. com. We’re going to click the show all ellipse symbol. We’re going to click compliance. That’s going to bring us into the compliance center. Now keep in mind you could do this through the retention area or records management area. In my case we’re talking about records management.
So I’m going to focus right here on records management, all right. And we’re going to go to create a label which you’ve seen before, going to go to File Plan. We’re going to say create a label, all right. And we’re going to call this label, I’ll call it Disposition Demo, all right? Disposition Demo. And we’re going to click Next and we’ll give it business function. You have a reference ID. I’m just going to associate this with maybe human resources this time category we’ll do Compliance, all right. And then authority type. This is business related, we’ll say. And then if we want to do a citation, we could. But I’m not I’m just going to leave that one alone. I’m going to click Next, all right? And then here’s where everything matters. All right? This is what really, really matters.
This is where we decide if we’re going to do a disposition. So we set our retention period right to whatever we want. And then we come down here and we can choose Trigger, a Disposition Review. It tells you reviewers you choose in the next step will receive an email, notifying them that it’s time to review items to decide if they can be safely deleted. So we’re going to go with that. We’re going to go ahead and click Next. And here is where we choose what to do so we can have different stages. You’ll notice that it will let you have a maximum of five stages. Okay. So we add a stage and I’m just going to say I could name the stage anything I want. I could say junior manager. Okay. And that’s the first stage.
And so then you pick your user who’s the Junior Manager, who’s going to approve it, right? And then if you wanted to do, let’s say, Senior Manager, that’s going to be our next stage. We could have another person who’s going to go from there. Of course, I’ve selected myself in both stages just for the heck of it. But you see the idea, all right, you could do five stages so different people could sign off on it, allow it to go to the next stage. Eventually, when it makes it to the final stage, we could have maybe the document gets deleted or it gets moved, but basically these people will be able to make the decision on what ultimately will happen with that document. Okay? All right. So pretty nice little feature. All right. Again, they do limit you to five. And that’s something I would remember if I were you’re, taking exam, something you’re going to want to remember.
So maximum of five stages. Okay. And then we would click Next and we would be able to finish. Of course, you’re going to notice a reviewer can’t be added more than once, right? So we’ll just go ahead and remove this particular one here, remove this stage. And we’ll just have the one stage. We’ll click next. We’ll click to create the label. And as always, it’s going to go ahead and process through. Once this is done, processing through, we will be able to create the policy, which you have seen quite a few times as far as creating policies go. So all in all, pretty straightforward. I can publish the label which creates the policy. There it is. Next. Choose the locations I want. I’m just going to do all and then give it a unique name. I’m just calling it disposition policy demo. Click Next.
All right. And then click to submit. And as always, you got to give it time before it’s actually ever going to take effect. An hour, 24 hours, and there you have it. So, all in all, very easy to work with dispositions. If you want, you can actually create a short period of time, label and have it sent to your email and see what it all looks like. It’s pretty neat and you can decide what to do, and that’ll give you a good kind of foundation, some good hands on experience, but hopefully that makes sense. It’s not really all that difficult. Just remember the stages. That’s going to be the key. All right? And remember that you’re going to do this through the label. You’re doing the Disposition configuration through the label, not the policy. But then you have to apply a policy before it actually takes effect.
