Setting up retention on a new tenant
1
Confirm retention is available
Retention is provisioned per tenant. Confirm it’s switched on for your tenant before you begin.
2
Grant access
Map the retention capabilities onto your user groups under Settings → Access → Permissions. At minimum, the people authoring policies need policy-manage and simulate.
3
Author the first policy — disabled
Create the policy with Enabled off. Set its criteria, retention period, grace period, deletion method, and (if used) approval and approver groups.
4
Simulate
Run a simulation. Review the matched total and the sample, and confirm the policy targets exactly what you expect.
5
Confirm the schedule
Make sure the processing window sits in your quiet hours, clear of business hours, backups, and indexing.
6
Turn on processing
Switch retention processing on for the tenant. Nothing is deleted yet — no policy is enabled.
7
Enable the policy
Flip the policy to Enabled. It’s picked up on the next scheduled cycle.
Troubleshooting
Where to read next
Administration & governance
Platform-wide audit, permissions, multi-tenancy, and observability — retention reuses these.
Document management
How documents are captured and stored — the surface that retention acts on.