Setting Retention Policies - Shared Mailboxes
- Ian York (Unlicensed)
- Jessica Benoit (Unlicensed)
Portal: https://outlook.office365.com/ecp/
Retention Policies for Shared Mailboxes are unique in that the current best method requires you to create/set up/build policies in separate places, and then require you to apply those policies to the mailboxes in an additional, as-yet-undiscussed location.
Retention Tags
Retention tags and retention policies help you manage email lifecycle. They specify when a mailbox item should be deleted or moved to the archive mailbox. You can also use a retention tag to never move or delete an item. Retention tags are grouped in a retention policy and the retention policy is applied to mailboxes.
In short, you must first create a Retention Tag before creating a Retention Policy.
We will be creating Default Policy Tags for this guide as its scope concerns policies which affect entire mailboxes.
Go to https://outlook.office365.com/ecp/ => “compliance management” => “retention tags” and click the + icon at the top-left of the list to create a new tag.
Creating A Retention Tag
When creating a retention tag, you only need to make 3 choices
Choose a descriptive tag name
WHAT you are tagging
Choose retention action
WHAT TO DO with what you are tagging
Choose when(whether) to take action
WHEN to do what to do with what you are tagging
Choosing “Never” will mean any mail with this tag will be kept forever.
Once you have created your retention tag, you may move on to creating a retention policy by going to that tab in the compliance management admin center.
Retention Policies
The next step is to create a Policy which groups Tags together. Click the “+” button at top-left of this list to create a new policy.
A policy may contain any number of tags, from a single tag policy and on up.
Applying Policies To Shared Mailboxes
Once you’ve created your policy, you will now navigate to the “New Exchange admin center” at https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/#/homepage.
Once there, go to “Mailboxes” on the left and find the mailbox in question in the list which appears. Click it, then click “Manage mailbox policies” in the pop out menu:
Click the pencil “Edit” button, then choose your retention policy from the dropdown.
Finally, VALIDATE that the policy has correctly applied once giving Exchange time to propagate the changes.