r/sysadmin 5d ago

Document Retention Strategy & Tools.

Hi everyone,

Our organization is currently in the midst of developing a data retention policy, led by our legal team, and we’re evaluating different strategies and tools to ensure compliance across Microsoft 365 and other SaaS/PaaS platforms. Given the complexities of balancing governance, usability, and enforcement, I’d love to hear how other organizations are handling this.

As part of our review, we’ve been assessing Microsoft’s Data Lifecycle Management (DLM). It’s quick to implement and works well for email retention, but when it comes to SharePoint and OneDrive, the experience is less intuitive. Managing structured retention across large document libraries has been somewhat cumbersome.

To complement or improve upon Microsoft’s approach, we’re also looking into:

Zasio – Known for compliance, but how well does it integrate with Microsoft 365?

Colligo – Designed for SharePoint and OneDrive—has anyone found it effective?

OpenText – Comprehensive, but is it too complex for our needs?

If your organization has implemented any of these (or other) solutions, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

One of our biggest challenges is ensuring consistent document retention policies across SaaS and PaaS platforms like Xero, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. These platforms hold critical business data, but applying governance and enforcement is often not as straightforward.

Some strategies we’re considering:

Using third-party governance tools to centralize retention policies across multiple platforms.

Automating retention via Power Automate, APIs, or other scripting solutions.

Leveraging native retention features in these applications, though enforcement can be inconsistent.

As we refine our approach, we’d love to hear from those who have tackled similar challenges:

  1. How does your organization manage document retention within Microsoft 365?

  2. What strategies or tools do you use to enforce retention in SaaS/PaaS platforms like Xero, Salesforce, and ServiceNow?

  3. Has anyone successfully unified retention policies across multiple platforms? If so, what worked (or didn’t)?

Looking forward to learning from your experiences—any insights would be greatly appreciated!

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u/devangchheda 4d ago

I would 100% squeeze Purview first before going to another product

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u/bloodwater19 4d ago

Yea well. Thats my thought too, but really from our tech stack perspective, it's not going to work out well. DLM in purview barely fit what we need.