Influencing Microsoft’s Roadmap

As announced last year, the Information and Records Management Society (IRMS) has been leading a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), which has been facilitating a conversation between Microsoft, the memberships of the IRMS and other professional organisations, leading subject matter experts and multiple national archival bodies around the world. The intention of this Board has been to help influence the direction of the records management capabilities provided within the Microsoft 365 platform.

We are delighted to announce that some of the issues that we brought to Microsoft’s attention last summer are now being significantly improved. Microsoft recently announced two new features, which represent a step toward more complete records management capabilities: “Multi-stage Disposition Review” (in public preview) and “Adaptive Retention Policies” (being tested in private preview).

These features address the following CAB requests:

• Dividing or breaking the disposition review into only what's applicable to the reviewer and the capability to delegate review.
  

Multi-Stage Disposition

This update allows organisations to introduce a multi-stage disposition process, which will allow each record to be subject to up to five separate stages of review. Importantly, this change will also introduce the ability to separate disposition review, allowing organisations to have different groups of reviewers who can see and review only those records under their remit. This is a huge improvement over the former approach, where disposition reviewers would all be granted access to see and review any record in the tenant. 

Read the Microsoft blog for full details.

Adaptive Retention Policies 

This update allows administrators to create retention policies scoped to geography, department, or another user or site attribute. For example, administrators can create a policy specifically for users in the UK's Human Resources team by leveraging the adaptive policy scope. 

See Microsoft's Roadmap for full details. 

Other Features to Watch on the Public Roadmap

• More investment in pre-built connectors
• Retention for modern attachments
• Retention for Teams private channels (in private preview)
• Retention for SharePoint Syntex form processing models
• Retention for Yammer networks
• Ability to delete a record label
• Increase file plan limits to allow an unlimited number of characters in the description

Driving the future

The IRMS is delighted to see this early success from the CAB engagement. Certainly, the ability to effectively delegate disposition review should be a huge step in the right direction for larger organisations. 

When we surveyed our members earlier this year, the most significant limitation of Microsoft 365’s records management capabilities was not being able to split or delegate disposition review - this issue was seen as being a Critical or Substantial blocker by 45% of respondents. As such, we’re ecstatic that having prioritised this issue with Microsoft last year, the IRMS CAB is already seeing the fruits of our labour result in tangible benefits for the wider records management community.

The CAB relationship with Microsoft will of course continue, allowing us to keep making suggestions and raising issues that will hopefully result in further improvements to the records management capabilities provided by Microsoft 365. Reynold Leming, Chair of the IRMS, said: “This is a wonderfully open and fruitful relationship between Microsoft and the information governance community, led by the IRMS. We have initially covered retention and disposition, are currently engaged in a conversation on email management and plan a next discussion on long-term preservation."

If you’d like to have your issues raised with Microsoft, why not consider becoming a member of the IRMS today, so that you can feed into our CAB working group?