1. Creating and Applying Retention Policies in Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive
Now when it comes to working with retention labels involving SharePoint and OneDrive, really the starting place would be to start on the SharePoint Admin Center. This is not really a SharePoint course, but it’s important to understand a few fundamentals when you think in regards to SharePoint. So if I’m going to come over here to show all and I’m going to scroll down a little bit and we’re going to click the SharePoint Admin Center here. And once we get into SharePoint Admin Center, a couple of things here involving SharePoint OneDrive for one. With SharePoint OneDrive, you can control the sharing settings here. So I’ve got right here where it says external sharing.
I can specify whether or not data can be shared inside, outside organization with guests and all that. That’s important for data retention as well because obviously information that’s being shared by your users, you have to consider the fact that it could have sensitive information such as financial data and all that. We want to be able to control who can share this information. So you can do that with this little bar right here. You can move it up or down for SharePoint and OneDrive if you want. So right now I’m doing most permissive, which is anyone, but you can set it to new existing guests, only existing guest, or only people in your organization. So if you want to really lock things down, you can go with this bottom option.
Okay. And then the other thing is there’s also some additional settings you can control over here on settings for both SharePoint and OneDrive. All right, now before you can really create a retention label for SharePoint sites, if you’re going to pick specific SharePoint sites, you’re going to need to go over here to active sites and you’re going to need to have create a site. As you can see, I’ve already got some sites that I’ve created. I’ve even got a couple that are pertaining to teams. But if you wanted to, you can just simply click to create yourself a site. Like maybe I’m going to do a team site, right? Give it a name, just going to call it retention demo or something. If I was involving retention for SharePoint OneDrive and then I can specify the different information here.
The retention demo, website name, language. If it’s going to be tied to a certain group owner, I could do that. I also have advanced settings here that I can select. Set a sensitivity. I can do a sensitivity label on that if I want my privacy. I can set this to be public or private. Okay. Time zone. I could set my time zone to whatever I want and specify this information here. So basically you fill all this information out. You can then click to Create. And then if you want to do additional owners for the SharePoint site, you can and then you can click Finish and you’ve now got the site all right from there you’re going to basically go over to the retention center where you’re going to our Compliance Center where you’re going to manage retention.
And you can do that by going to Compliance Microsoft.com, or if you want to go through the portal Microsoft. com, which is the way I normally show you can do that as well. All right, so here we are on Compliance Microsoft. com. We’re going to go down to where it says Information Governance. And at that point we can go over here to label policies and we can click to publish a label. And so if we’ve already got a label, the seven year retention label, maybe we’re going to apply that to a specific SharePoint side. Or maybe we’re going to create another label perhaps let’s do, why don’t we do that? Let’s do another label. We’ll say ten year deletion. Okay. And just select ten years.
All right. Delete automatically. Next, create. All right. And oh, if you’ve already got, I think I’ve actually already got something called that an older label that I deleted and it’s probably still in the process of being deleted. So we’ll click create. We’ve now officially got that. And we could say publish to all auto, apply to specific content or do nothing. So right now I’m going to say do nothing. We’re going to click Done and we’ll come over here to label policies. Will click to publish the label, choose the label, label type we want to use. We’re going to use ten year deletion. We’re going to click next. And then here we’re going to say this is where the magic happens.
We’re going to select the places that we want this to go to. So SharePoint OneDrive. Now let me warn you, if you’ve just recently started creating retention labels, it can be 24 hours before SharePoint Sites and OneDrive accounts will show up. So be advised that if you click Edit Sites, you may not see anything right now, but once that’s processed through, you can click Edit Sites or Edit Accounts under OneDrive and you can select specific sites or accounts that you want. Don’t forget that there’s inclusions and exclusions. Exclusions override inclusions. I know I’ve probably said that before, but I always want to reiterate that because that’s important as well.
If you’re taking a test, you’re going to want to know that exclusions will override inclusion. So if there’s ever a situation perhaps where you have something involved in both exclusions will override inclusions, you’re not going to deal with that too bad. With SharePoint and OneDrive, it’s groups where that becomes a big problem. But we’re going to go ahead and click Next and we’ll give this policy a name. We’ll say Ten year deletion for SharePoint and OneDrive and we’ll click Next and submit. And there you go. Remember that this can take 24 hours before it officially takes effect, but click done. And we’ve now officially created our policy for SharePoint and OneDrive.
2. Creating and Applying Retention Policies in Microsoft Teams
So with retention policies you also have the ability to apply those policies to Microsoft 365 Groups, which of course can apply with Microsoft Teams. And the first step in that is to make sure that you have teams. You have a license for Teams and so make sure you’ve got Microsoft 365 License or Office 365 License that has Teams in. The next thing is you got to actually set up a team, right? And there’s a couple of ways you can go about doing that. One way is to come right here on Portal Microsoft. com, you’re going to go to Teams and Groups and go to Active Teams and Groups and you’re just going to click to create a group and you’re going to choose a Microsoft 365 Group.
That’s what’s going to let you set up a team with the group. Give the group a name, perhaps maybe I’m going to call this Finance Users. That’ll be the name that I give it. Give it a description. Click Next and then assign your owner. Make sure that your owner has a team’s license, okay? That’s kind of an important part of this, that the owner has a team’s license. So here we are. John Christopher has a team’s license. All right, we’ll click Add and we’ll click Next. At that point we can start adding members, okay? And your members would take part in the teams, make sure they have license as well if they’re going to use Teams. Also keep in mind that if the owner does not have teams, this right here will be grayed out and we want this to be selected.
We’re going to create a team for this group, okay? And we’re just going to call it the group email address that will be associated with this because of course with Microsoft 365 Groups, they get an email address. It will be finance users. We’re going to make this a private group, which also makes it a private team, which means people have to be brought into the team. They can’t just join the team without permissions. So then we would click Next and then we’ll create the group. And just like that we’ve created ourselves a group with teams. It can also have a SharePoint site associated to it and all that, but I’m not going to get into that right now.
The next thing I want to show you is that another option is we can do this through Teams. So I could go to show all and then go to the Teams Admin Center by clicking teams. All right. And that’s going to bring us here into the Microsoft Teams Admin Center. From there we’ll just drop down right here where it says Teams and we’ll click Manage Teams. And then from there we can go and we can click Add and we could create the team through this as well. So another option of doing this, keep in mind when you create the team through here, it’s also going to create the Microsoft 365 Group as well. So a few different ways you can do this ultimately to get your team, all right? So from there we are going to go to Compliance Microsoft. com.
So compliance. Microsoft. com we’re going to go down to the information governance blade. All right. And why don’t we create a label specifically for teams? So we’re going to click to create. We’re going to call this five year deletion for retention. Okay, give it a description, all that fun stuff. We’ll set it to five years. All right. We’re going to make this available to our team users. So here we go, creating it. I’m going to say do nothing right now. I’m not going to publish it yet. I just want to see it show up. There it is right there. So now we’ll go over to label policies and we’ll publish it. You can publish things in one go, but I kind of like to show you the steps.
So here it is. Choose your labels to publish. So we’ll go right here and select Five Year Deletion for attention. If we wanted to go ahead and add one of these other labels, we could. All right, so we’ll just add both of those for fun. And we’ll click Add. All right. From there we’re going to click Next and we’re going to say, let me choose the specific locations. We’re going to turn off all the locations except for the Microsoft 365 Groups. Keep in mind that you can edit that and you can select specific groups you want to do. Like, for example, I could say finance users. And that’s going to tie that to the teams where I want it to go.
So we’ll click Next and we’ll give it a name. I’m going to call this finance. Users retention for teams. Give it any name you want, really. And then we’ll click next and we’ll click Submit. All right? And if you get an error like this, just give it a little bit of time. It’s going to take some time for that group to process, so just don’t worry about that error. You may need to give it a little bit of time, maybe an hour or so for it to process through and then you’ll be able to submit it. So I just let it sit there and submit. All right, so that’s after I waited a while, almost an hour, and now it officially was published and I can click Done.
3. Recovering Content in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and One Drive
So let’s take a look now at the concept of files that have been deleted, whether they be deleted by a user or whether they be deleted by retention policy and label and how we can recover that if it involves Team, SharePoint or One Drive. So here we are on WWW. OFFICE. COM. We’re going to click on the little waffle symbol, as they call it here. And then we’re going to go to Teams. So we’ll jump over into Teams here and I’m just going to open up the web app version of Teams. So here I am in Microsoft Teams and I’m going to go to the finance users team that we have. And on the finance users team, we’re just going to click on files, all right, on the general channel. And we’ve got three files that have been uploaded and shared within this team.
So let’s say that either a retention policy label has gone in and deleted one of these after a certain amount of time, or b a user deletes one of these. So just go right here. We’re just going to say delete, all right? And the quarterly report spreadsheet is deleted. By the way, if you want to try this out, you can always just upload some files using this little upload component here menu tab. So from there, I’m now freaking out, let’s say, okay, I’ve got the file missing, it’s been deleted, what do I do? And I want to recover it. So I’m just going to go over here to this little ellipse symbol and I’m going to click Open in SharePoint, all right? And when we get an Open and SharePoint, we can go here to the recycling bin.
And once that loads up, you’ll see the quarterly reports is there, all right, so I can go right there and I can restore that file. Or if I wanted to permanently delete the file, I could, but I’m going to say restore the file, all right? And we’ll jump back over into Teams and we’re just going to refresh our screen and see if the file is back, all right? So I just refreshed my web browser and you’ll see that the file is back. So that’s easy enough. Now what about so that’s SharePoint and Teams connected together there. And then what about One Drive? So take a look at One Drive. We’re just going to go to Portal Office. Com or WWW. OFFICE. COM, either one, all right, and let’s go right here into One Drive. So here’s One Drive.
And we’ve got some files here that we can look at if we delete a file; I’m just going to pick this file called Document Doc. We’ll delete that file and then we’re just going to jump right over to recycling bin. And we now have the ability to undelete that file if we want. So it really works kind of the same exact way. You can do this with personal data; you can do it with shared data. But all in all, as far as going in and deleting recovering data. It’s all pretty straightforward with Team SharePoint and One Drive again, though, keep in mind I’m triggering the deletion myself here, but if it was done by a retention label if a retention label did this, it’s going to end up in the same place. So you’re still going to be able to come in here. You’ll have 30 days to go in and recover that in the recycling bin.
4. Recovering Content in Microsoft Exchange
Let’s now take a look at how we can recover emails using Microsoft Exchange in a situation where a user has deleted their emails. So first up here we can go into, we’ll just play the role of the user. Here we are on WWW. OFFICE. COM. We’re going to click on the little waffle symbol and go to Outlook. Once we get an Outlook, we can go through here, here and we could delete some emails. Okay, so pick out a couple of emails you want to delete, all right? And then at that point we have deleted items and we can go through and we can just say we want to delete these emails, right? We can go through and say empty the folder, permanently delete the emails, all that. The next part of this though is we need to make sure that we can recover the email. Now to do that, we’re going to do that through.
We’re going to go to Portal Microsoft. com, we’re going to click the show all lip symbol and we’re going to go to Exchange. All right, you’re going to do this from the new Exchange Admin Center as opposed to the old one. So if you’re in the classic, like this is the classic, you want to make sure you go to the new one, all right? And if you start out in the new one, you’re fine. But it just depends on if you got an older tenant or newer tenant you may end up going. Microsoft is kind of flip flopping this lately. It’s like some tenants will start out in the new and some won’t. Okay, so this is the new Admin Center. All right, we’re going to go to Mailboxes and we’re going to click on the mailbox. Now let me warn you right here, this is the mailbox of, let’s say the user I want to restore email on.
You’re going to notice that we have a thing called recover deleted items. Now there is one strange thing that’s going on where some people, this is grayed out. And I’ve tried and tried and tried to find on the internet what the reason for this is. And there’s no Microsoft documentation that really gets into it. But if that occurs to you, if this is grayed out, then what you need to do is you need to go over to Roles and you need to go to Admin Roles and you need to say add role and then just create some kind of a role, role group. We’ll just call it email recovery role. All right? And then from there we’re going to click Next and you kind of scroll down, you can see these different role permissions that you’ve got.
All right. And so we’re just going to do a search for, let me find it. Let’s go with the word export. There it is. Mailbox, import, export. So we’re going to select that role and then we’re going to click next and we’re going to add I’m just going to add myself as the admin John Christopher and click next and add Role. Now from there, you’ve added yourself to that role. You need to give it about an hour and then close out of the tab here and then reopen it. And then that should solve your problem if that is grayed out for you. So if everything is good, you should now be able to go back over to mailboxes. You can click on John Christopher, whatever user you’re dealing with, and then you’re going to click on Recover Deleted Items.
And then from there, very easily, you can see the deleted items that we’ve got here. And if we want to select something to recover, we just select it. So if I wanted to just recover all of these, or I don’t want to do all of them, I’ll just do these first two. I can say recover deleted items and they’re going to show up right back in the inbox. And that is how you can recover email that’s been deleted. You’ll notice it says past 30 days, past 14 days, seven days, custom range, but all in all, very easy to implement. The main thing is just remembering that if that link is grayed out, that button is great out for getting into this area. You need to go ahead and do that role group thing and that should solve your problem.
5. Implementing Retention Policies and Tags in Microsoft Exchange Classic
I’d now like to talk a little bit about retention with Microsoft Exchange. Now one thing I want to warn you about is that Exchange is going through a transition period right now at the creation of this video and they are moving away from the classic way of dealing with retention and Exchange and moving it into the Compliance Center. Okay? So I’m going to begin just by showing you the classic ways that retention labels and tags are managed and then we’ll take a look at the way it’s handled. Now in the newer system, you can still use either one. You can use the classic way or the newer way. We’ll take a look at the classic method first because this is something that could be mentioned on the exam.
All right, so here we are on portal Microsoft. com and we’re going to click Show All. We’re going to go down to the Exchange blade here and click on that. That’s going to bring us into the exchange admin center. And mine is starting in the classic view. If you’re in the new Exchange view, you don’t want to be in the new Exchange view. You want to be in the classic view to see this. So if you’re in the new Exchange Admin Center, there’s going to be a button that says Classic and you can go to that. So once we’re here, we’re going to go to compliance management and right over here we’re going to click on something called retention tags.
So right there, right out of the gates, you can see that they’re warning you that you can create and publish labels using the Compliance Center, right? And that’s really what they want you to do. Now at some point they will probably retire this, but they haven’t yet. So here we are. Okay, so in Microsoft Exchange you have what are called retention tags which are sort of like labels. So instead of the word label, they use the word tag, right? And it’s kind of the same thing. There’s a bunch of built in tags here like one month delete, one week delete, one year delete, five year, six months. Some of these are personal, which means that users can use them flag emails to do this, flag emails to be deleted after a certain amount of time.
You’ve also got some that are just default, like default two year move to archive. That means emails will just, unless they’re tagged with a different one of these tags, they’re going to get moved into the archive folder, which is another place for it to kind of keep things backed up. You have deleted items, you have junk mail, you never delete. So a user can set it to unlimited. You have personal one year delete, personal, five year move to archive, personal, never move to Archive. So you have all these different tags and you can add additional tags if you want. So you can say go here and say I want to apply this to my entire mailbox.That means it’s a default tag.
Or you can make it a specific folder, or you can create a personal tag, all right? And so from there, you’re going to click on I’m going to do personal, and then I’m just going to say seven year delete. All right? So delete. And you can say delete and allow recovery, which means they can get out of their cycling bin. We’re going to say permanently delete. So I’m going to do seven years. And we’ll just say perm delete, okay? And a user gets to flag their email with this. This isn’t something that automatically happens. A user is going to tag this, okay? And then from there, we’re going to click retention period. We can set that in a certain amount of time. So in our case, if we’re thinking in regards to seven years, seven times 365 is going to be 2555 days. So we’ll just say 2555, okay? You could set comment, all right? And then if you want to click save, you can.
Now, let me warn you, this is something that can take a while. When you click save on this, it does not always happen this fast, okay? So give it a few minutes. And I’ve also noticed that on these trial tenants, sometimes it may throw an error the first time and then you need to go and try it again. So just give it a little bit of time. Sometimes it’ll happen fast, sometimes it won’t. I got lucky this time. It happens fast for me. So now that we got a tag, the tag is not really being applied yet because we have to go to retention policies to do that. We’re going to go over to retention policies and there is a default policy that’s already in place, okay? So this is for mail retention, all right? And it’s already applying all of these. Now if you want, you can edit the existing one and go ahead and apply the new tag that you want.
Or you could create another one of these and have it applied to certain people. So I’m going to go ahead and edit this default one. And then from there, we’re going to add the new tag that we’ve created, okay? We’re going to click the little plus sign here and wait on it to pop up. And then we’re going to go and add seven year perm delete. We’re going to click add, click OK, and then click save. And at that point, it’s going to apply it to this policy yet again. Let me forewarn you, this is something that can take a while. It can be an hour, between an hour and 24 hours on a trial tenant before you’ll see this in your outlook, before it will show up, okay? But that is how retention tags and policies are used with the client classic Microsoft Exchange.
