Microsoft Purview Records Management technical deep-dive
You may have seen earlier articles like this one, showing how to locate documents in Microsoft SharePoint Online that have one or more enterprise keywords attached. The challenge here is to avoid search results including items that have that keyword as part of their full text.
From this, some companies have wondered if enterprise keywords may be used to classify their content into categories that may be mapped against their information retention schema. In practice, this proves to be a bit more challenging than you would initially expect. We found out the hard way but are happy to share a practical solution in this article.
The prerequisite to use enterprise keywords in SharePoint Online as a reference for retention schemas is threefold:
So the technique of setting up MS Search to enable searching for keyword-tagged items only works as such, but we found that it does not apply to Purview Records Management. To summarize, the idea is to map a managed search property to the available keyword crawled properties, and then use it in item searches instead of using just the keyword itself, which also renders full-text results.
However, the auto-apply policy function in Purview Records Management did not accept a keyword matching query based on the managed property we defined. After some additional research and experimenting, we found the solution:
This will work. You may test the query first in MS Search – only items that have the specified keyword tagged should be returned in the search result. You may also turn on simulation mode with the newly defined policy (but we found it does not always behave consistently, recommend to use the MS Search method instead).
Hope this research helps you consider the use of keywords to map your content to your retention schema, as one of the many options to achieve that.
In case of questions or concerns, feel free to reach out.