After we got taken over, we were notified that our parent company has a “Retention Policy”. This is the time when information will be permanently deleted.
This affected emails, Teams messages, OneDrive files, and SharePoint data.
| Emails | 90 days |
| Archived Emails | 3 years |
| Shared emails | 3 years |
| Teams personal chats | 90 days |
| Team Channel posts | 3 years |
| OneDrive | 5 years since modified |
| Sharepoint | 1-5 years (decided via approval process) |
When we were told this, we thought it was ridiculous. How many times has someone needed to dig up an old email to determine why code was written the way it was? How many times have we dug up an old Team chat to know how to fix a random configuration error that suddenly happened?
If they are deleted after 90 days, then we will lose a lot of information.
After raising concerns, we initially got pushback along the lines of “if it’s important, then it should be in a Team Channel or on Sharepoint“.
But even then it can still be deleted after a length of time. 3 years might sound a lot but it soon passes by.
It sounded like there was no warning when information was about to be deleted either. It just disappears silently and there’s nothing you can do about it if you didn’t copy it elsewhere.
There was more pushback when some long-standing employees said they would have to go through 10 years of emails to decide what could potentially be useful and what isn’t. After a lot of pushback, we got the email policy increased to 3 years.
Stranger Coding Tings 