Scheduling and processing
Retention processing — the recurring job that tags, approves, deletes, and purges documents — runs on a schedule, separately from the rest of the feature.- It can be turned off independently. While processing is off, you can still author policies, run simulations, place legal holds, and review everything in the UI — but no documents are tagged or deleted. This is the safe default until the first policy is signed off.
- By default it runs overnight — a daily cycle starting at 10 PM, within a 22:00–06:00 processing window, in the tenant’s time zone. A cycle that starts inside the window may finish after it, but a new cycle won’t start outside the window.
- The schedule is set per tenant. Place it in your quiet hours, clear of business hours, backups, and any indexing or AI processing.
Access and permissions
Retention access is granted per capability to user groups, under Settings → Access → Permissions. A user receives the combined permissions of every group they belong to. Changes to a group’s grants take effect within a few minutes.retention.admin is a catch-all: on its own it satisfies every retention permission check, so granting it is equivalent to granting everything below. Treat it as a tenant-administrator grant.
The retention navigation appears once the feature is switched on for the tenant; the individual screens then check the relevant permission, so a user only sees what their groups allow.
Where to read next
Setup & troubleshooting
Stand retention up on a new tenant, and resolve common issues.