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How to determine which retention policies are applied to a given SharePoint site

Posted on March 29, 2023
SharePoint

I had an interesting dilemma a few weeks ago with one of my clients. They created several retention policies and applied them to various SharePoint sites in their tenant. They now had a business need to delete one of the sites as they no longer used it. However, by design, they could not delete it because there was a compliance policy applied to that site. So they needed a way to determine which retention policies were applied.

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Since they had so many different site and label retention policies created and applied, they wanted a quick way to find which policy affected a given site so they could exclude the site from it. Here is how we got to the bottom of this.

  1. Navigate to the Compliance Center (Microsoft Purview)Whichretentionpolicies1
  2. In the menu on the left-hand side, click Policiesdetermine which retention policies
  3. On the Policies/Data lifecycle management page, click Policy lookup tabdetermine which retention policies
  4. In the search wizard below, choose Site in the Find policies that include drop-down, then paste the URL of a site and click Searchdetermine which retention policies
  5. You will now get the search results that match the above criteria. They will show all the policies applied to a given site.determine which retention policies
  6. You can then edit a policy and exclude it from a given site as necessary. By the way, this Policy lookup will find both site retention and label retention policies.

About Me

I’m Greg Zelfond, a U.S. based SharePoint consultant, and I provide affordable out-of-the-box SharePoint consulting, training, and configuration assistance to small and medium-sized businesses all over the world.

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