Reading Time: 4 minutesI think we all agree automating as much retention as possible is a good thing. The less we have to rely on information workers to manually apply a retention label, the better. The information architecture you’ve diligently defined in your tenant can now be leveraged using auto-apply conditions to automatically set an Office 365 retention label.Microsoft has also announced machine learning classifiers to help with the growing amount of corporate “dark data” (not within a well-defined information architecture).

• Anatomical Automatic Labeling Manual

This will apply out-of-the-box and custom classifiers to intelligently apply retention across your tenant by classifying content based on meaning and context. I haven’t seen this in any tenant I’ve worked with yet, but this will add another level of automation many organizations are waiting for! Once I see it, I’ll blog about itLicensing the capability to auto-apply labels described in this post requires an Office 365 Enterprise E5 license for each user who has permissions to edit content that’s been automatically labeled in a site. Users who simply have read-only access do not require a license.If you don’t have the license for the auto-apply functionality or you have advanced logic to determine if a retention label should be applied that can’t be done in the auto-apply condition, refer to another post of mine where I show an alternative way to automatically set a Retention Label using Microsoft Flow:. This provides a lot of flexibility to include any kind of logic you may require to set the label.Retention labels can be auto-applied based on 3 conditions:. sensitive information types (both out-of-the-box and custom). keywords.

content types and metadataThis post describes the third option above to demonstrate the auto-apply behavior across several column data types and content types in SharePoint. Due to the fact that the retention label isn’t applied immediately (controlled by a back-end process that runs once per week), this is not a quick test to do. I’ve spent the time testing this, so I’m sharing the results and learning with you!Please refer to the ‘Important things to know’ section at the end of this post for some key takeaways on this functionality. I will update the takeaways as I learn more.Apply a Retention Label based on a Content TypeContent type called Contract document has been added to a document library.

Retention label called Contract has been created and auto-applied based on the condition below:ContentType:’Contract document’The result? Within a week, any SharePoint site the retention label is published to had the Contract retention label applied to all documents with the content type of Contract document.Apply a Retention Label based on a Choice Metadata columnA choice metadata column, ContractType, has been added to a library.

Anatomical Automatic Labeling Manual

I want to use one of the choice values to set a retention label. The auto-generated managed property from the search schema cannot be used in the auto-apply condition. You must manually map the crawled property to a RefinableString property (it’s queryable).

For this example, I’ve mapped the crawled property generated for metadata column, ContractType, to RefinableString00.Retention label called Hardware has been created and auto-applied based on the condition below:RefinableString00:HardwareThe result? Within a week, any SharePoint site the retention label is published to had the Hardware retention label applied to all documents with a choice value of ‘Hardware’ on the ContractType metadata column.Apply a Retention Label on a compound conditionWhat about combining conditions? You can do this too! This test combined a content type name of Contract document with a choice value of Software. A retention label called Software has been created and auto-applied based on the condition below:ContentType:’Contract document’ AND RefinableString00:SoftwareThe result? Within a week, any SharePoint site the retention label is published to had the Software retention label applied to all documents with a content type of Contract document and a choice value of ‘Software’ on the ContractType metadata column.Apply a Retention Label on a Date column.