Announcing general availability of Records Management

On behalf of the entire Microsoft 365 community, I am incredibly excited to announce the general availability of our Records Management solution to help meet your legal, business and regulatory recordkeeping obligations.

As remote work becomes the new normal, securing and governing your company’s most critical data is of paramount importance. Records Management provides you with greater depth in protecting and governing critical data. With Records Management, you can:

Classify, retain, review, dispose, and manage content without compromising productivity or data security
Leverage machine learning capabilities to identify and classify regulatory, legal, and business critical records at scale
Demonstrate compliance with regulations through defensible audit trails and proof of destruction

We look forward to hearing from all of you on how Records Management is helping you meet your compliance needs.

Get started

Eligible Microsoft 365 E5 customers can start using Records Management in the Compliance Center or learn how to try or buy a Microsoft 365 subscription.
Read this blog by Alym Rayani to learn about additional details of Records Management capabilities.
Learn more about Records Management in our documentation.
Attend an upcoming technical webinar:

EMEA: May 26, 2020 16:00 GMT (Calendar invite, Attendee link)

North America: May 26, 2020 12:00 PST (Calendar invite, Attendee link)

FAQ on Records Management

Where can I access Microsoft 365 Records Management?

In the Microsoft 365 compliance center, go to Solutions > Records management

Before my organization can use Records Management, does every user in the tenant need a license that entitles them to use it?

No. For licensing details, see the Records Management section from Microsoft 365 licensing guidance for security & compliance. At a high level, everyone with edit access to a location where records management features are used must be licensed.

Why can I see the Records Management solution if I’m not licensed for it?

At this time any customer will be able to see the solution even if you’re not licensed for it, although not all functionality will work as expected. In the near future, this will change, and you won’t be able to see records management options if you’re not appropriately licensed.

How is this solution different from Information Governance?

While our Information Governance solution focuses on providing a simple way to keep the data you want and delete what you don’t, the Records Management solution is geared towards meeting the record-keeping requirements of your business policies and external regulations. This will be the only location where you can create record labels or take advantage of some of our more advanced processes such as disposition review.

How is this solution different from SharePoint’s in-place records management or records center?

This solution is our next evolution in providing Microsoft 365 customers with records management scenarios. It uses a different underlying technology than our legacy functionality in SharePoint, and also goes across Microsoft 365 beyond just SharePoint.
This new solution is where our future investments in records management will be made and we recommend any SharePoint Online customers using SharePoint’s in-place records management, content organizer, or the SharePoint records center to evaluate migrating to this new way of managing your records.

What does declaring something as a record do?

Our online documentation provides detailed description of the enforcements we add to an item that has been declared as a record. At a high-level, declaring content to be a record prevents any edits to that item and it will be preserved for the period of time you specify.

Is Records Management supported in Teams?

Yes, users can share, co-author (if unlocked), and access records in Teams through the app, web or mobile. Thanks to the integration with SharePoint document library views, you also can add the retention label to the default view of the Teams document library and see which retention label is applied to each file. To declare files as records or edit retention labels from Teams – you must do this in SharePoint by clicking “Open in SharePoint” from the “Files” tab. We plan to support more records management capabilities in Teams and we will share more details as we get closer to the date through the public roadmap.

Can I manage all record and non-record labels, policies and process in records management?

Yes. Records management in the Microsoft 365 compliance center is the place to manage your complete retention schedules and processes, even for content that you don’t declare as records.