Setting up retention on a new tenant
Confirm retention is available
Retention is provisioned per tenant. Confirm it’s switched on for your tenant before you begin.
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.
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.
Simulate
Run a simulation. Review the matched total and the sample, and confirm the policy targets exactly what you expect.
Confirm the schedule
Make sure the processing window sits in your quiet hours, clear of business hours, backups, and indexing.
Turn on processing
Switch retention processing on for the tenant. Nothing is deleted yet — no policy is enabled.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Retention section missing from the navigation | Retention isn’t switched on for the tenant, or the user’s groups have no retention access | Confirm retention is provisioned; grant at least retention.policies.view to the user’s group |
| Policy enabled but nothing is tagged | Processing is paused, hasn’t run since you enabled the policy, or the policy matches zero documents | Confirm processing is on, wait for the next cycle, and re-run the simulation |
| Documents stay Tagged and never delete | The grace period hasn’t elapsed, or the policy requires approval and the batch is still pending | Check the document’s retention status for its current state and timing; approve the open batch if needed |
| Documents land in Quarantine | A transient error during processing — storage briefly unavailable, the document changed mid-process, or a legal hold landed between tagging and deletion | Open the quarantine entry for the recorded reason and retry once the underlying issue is resolved |
| Nothing happens overnight | The schedule sits outside the processing window, or processing is paused | Confirm the schedule and that processing is switched on |
| An approval batch is open but nothing can be approved | Every document in it was excluded or placed on hold after the batch was created | It’s auto-rejected on the next cycle; a fresh batch forms if documents still match |
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.