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.
| Capability | Grant to |
|---|---|
retention.policies.view | Anyone who needs to see policies — auditors, support |
retention.policies.manage | Retention administrators only |
retention.documents.view | Same as policies.view — the per-document status shows what policy is acting on a document |
retention.documents.rescue | Document owners or a designated rescue group |
retention.documents.exclude | Retention administrators; rarely a wider group |
retention.approvals.view | Anyone in the approval chain |
retention.approvals.manage | Members of approver groups (further restricted per policy by its approver-group config) |
retention.holds.view | Legal / compliance team |
retention.holds.manage | Legal / compliance team |
retention.simulate | Anyone authoring or reviewing policies |
retention.quarantine.view | Support / operations |
retention.quarantine.manage | Support / operations |
retention.reports.view | Auditors, compliance, anyone reviewing retention activity |
retention.admin | Tenant administrators only — satisfies every retention permission check on its own. Grant deliberately |
Where to read next
Setup & troubleshooting
Stand retention up on a new tenant, and resolve common issues.