Ever implemented an Office 365 Retention policy to retain SharePoint Online content? What did you think of the impact to your users? These kinds of compliance policies should be invisible to users and their experience on the platform but this certainly isn’t.
On a recent project, our customer had a requirement to retain all content for a minimum of two years across all workloads. To achieve this, we implemented an Office 365 retention policy that applied to all Locations set to retain all content for two years from creation.
While implementing these retention policies was disturbingly easy, I can’t get over the negative impact it had on the user experience. To keep this brief, I’ve kept this to a list of my three main issues, as follows:
1. User can no longer delete sub-sites
I’ve put this first as it is the most annoying one in my opinion and affects most users. Because all content in the sub-site, including list items, is covered by the retention policy the site cannot be deleted. You can delete all the content out of that site, but because the content is retained in the Preservation Hold Library when you try to delete the subsite itself you are greeted with this message.
Why is this? Why can’t the site just be automatically renamed to something random and sent to the depths of SharePoint archives never to be seen again (but still discoverable). I don’t see why the user should be impacted by something they don’t care about. They just want their content gone!
Advice to users: We advised the customer to instead rename subsites, this would free up the namespace should they wish to recreate a site with the same name in the future.
2. It breaks Information Management Policies at the Site Collection Level
Okay, I admit this one isn’t going to affect every user, however, it does seem to upset the more outspoken power users. I had one user in particular who just wanted to harmlessly send content to the recycle bin when it was no longer needed. They had set up a simple Information Management policy on the document library to delete content that hadn’t been modified for 180 days.
The user had been successful in creating the policy but after some time had passed had realised it simply was not doing anything. I was so confident that it wasn’t the O365 policy we had set, I mean all the policy was doing was sending to the recycle bin and no Retention policy prevents that. Wrong!
Once we excluded the Site from the tenant policy all was working as expected. While this wasn’t how we wanted to leave things for obvious reasons it did prove that the Retention Policy was to blame.
This really needs to be addressed, or at the very least SharePoint Sites that are under retention should not have the option to create Information Management Policies if they’re not going to work.
Advice to users: Sorry!
3. Users can no longer delete a folder without having to first delete everything inside that folder
This one doesn’t need much explaining, it is exactly as the heading suggests. For some strange reason, when a Site is under retention SharePoint Online insists that users go into each folder and delete every individual file. Imagine having to do this for a folder with 10k items in 2k folders. Madness!
This one seems like the easiest for Microsoft to fix and while isn’t world ending, will just niggle away at users. Sometimes it’s the little things that can completely ruin our experience using these tools.
Advice to users: Sync the library and delete the folder in Windows Explorer. This was not possible for everyone though, specifically Windows 7 users with not enough HDD space as they did not have Files-on-Demand.
Conclusion
In conclusion, as annoying as they are, I don’t think these things would prevent me implementing a similar policy at future customers. That being said, however, these behaviours are maddening and I will make sure every customer is fully aware of them so they can make an informed decision about retention. I hope this post lets you do the same!
If you wish to exclude a SharePoint site from your retention policy, you can see how to do so here.
I am begging you Microsoft, please fix these issues!
