Purview lets retention policies archive inactive SharePoint files
Reviewed by Helen Jones
Microsoft’s updated rollout for Purview Data Lifecycle Management adds an Archive action to retention policies for inactive SharePoint Online and OneDrive files. Public preview is due to complete in early September, with worldwide general availability scheduled to start in mid-September; the action is off by default and needs administrator configuration.
Until now, keeping a file under retention and moving it out of active collaboration storage were separate decisions. That left administrators choosing between active SharePoint storage, manual clean-up, or a broader archive approach that could be too blunt for a live site. The new policy action can move inactive files into Microsoft 365 Archive while preserving compliance discovery, but archived content is excluded from Copilot indexing. That makes archiving a search-and-knowledge-quality decision as well as a storage and retention decision.
Analysis
Ask your Purview and SharePoint owners to identify one non-critical retention policy and decide whether excluding its inactive files from Copilot answers fits the business’s discovery needs before enabling the preview.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Purview lets retention policies archive inactive SharePoint files", Collab365 Spaces.