Microsoft Purview

Latest Articles

Practical Purview: Removing Old Items from User Calendars

A reader wants to remove all calendar items over a certain age. Compliance purge actions seem like a good way to do this, but there's a problem that needs to be fixed. eDiscovery purges can do the job, but only if you have eDiscovery Premium. And then there's Graph APIs to consider. All in all, many ways exist to purge calendar items.

June 9, 2025

Practical Power Platform: Areas for Microsoft 365 Administrators to Explore

With Microsoft Power Platform on the rise with over 56 million monthly active users, governance is vital to reduce potential risk. In this first installment of Practical Power Platform, we discuss essential areas Microsoft 365 admins should focus on, including the Power Platform Admin Center, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, tenant isolation, and Microsoft Purview auditing.

May 27, 2025

How Microsoft Put Purview Priority Cleanup Together and How it Works

For years, Microsoft has told us that items held by retention policies or eDiscovery holds are immutable and cannot be removed. Well, that's not quite the case as proven by the launch of the Purview Priority Cleanup solution, which is able to find and remove held items (only in Exchange Online for now). There's lots of interesting technology to discuss, but I wonder if Priority Cleanup is too complex and a tad slow to succeed.

March 25, 2025

Practical Compliance: Using Purge Actions to Remove Mailbox Items

Compliance search purge actions are Microsoft's search and purge tool. Today, a purge action is limited to removing 10 items per mailbox. Microsoft is increasing the limit to 100 as part of its eDiscovery modernization project. This article reviews the state of the art for using PowerShell to purge mailbox items and contemplates how purges might work after modernization finishes.

October 21, 2024

Practical Compliance: Microsoft Revamps Purview eDiscovery

Microsoft is giving Purview eDiscovery a make-over to introduce a modernized UI and to simplify the solution into standard and premium variants. Content searches are going away, but the same functionality is available as a standard case. It's time to prepare the folks who work on compliance and run eDiscovery investigations for the changes coming at the end of 2024/2025.

October 10, 2024

How to use Targeted Mailbox Collections with Microsoft 365 Content Searches

Targeted collections are a method available to focus Microsoft 365 content searches on specific mailbox folders or folders in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. In this article, we discuss how to retrieve the folder identifiers needed for a content query using the Recoverable Items folders as an example. Targeted collections are a great way to run ultra-precise content searches when you're looking for the proverbial pea in a haystack of mailboxes.

July 13, 2023