SharePoint Online Information Management Policies

Question

I have some questions regarding Information Management Policies in a SharePoint Online environment.

I have taken the required steps to set a retention policy a library.

1. I turned on the Content Organizer feature from the Site Collection Features
2. Got the Web Service URL from the Content Organizer Settings
3. Set a destination called Archive (based on (3)) in the SharePoint Admin's Record Management section
4. Then I created the Information management policies on the library and instructed them to "Move and Leave link". These libraries have this format: an "Investigation" content type (based on folder) and Document content type. For testing purposes, I set the policy to expire after 1 day from Created date for the document content type and 2 days from Created date for the "Investigation" content type.

I have taken these steps yesterday and I suspect nothing happened yet because there's a default scheduled time when this is supposed to happen which has not been hit yet.

1. Does the information management policy have a scheduled time to run? Is it once a week? And when? Where do you get that information from? And is it modifiable?

2. Let's say a document "TestDoc" inside a Registration Folder "Reg001" expires in the library "Lib" with Information Management Policy set with "Archive1" as moving destination, (this would be the first expired document) would the library "Archive1" be created, clone "Reg001" as a folder just for the sake of moving "TestDoc" inside of it?

3. And then when "Reg001" itself expires, it would already find the folder created in the "Archive1" library, and would simply delete it from the "Lib" since it has already been moved?

SharePoint Online Retention policies are still a new, yet exciting area to me. Pressed against time I would rather be sure that I am set on the right track. Am I understanding correctly? Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Does the information management policy have a scheduled time to run? Is it once a week? And when? Where do you get that information from? And is it modifiable?

Yes - there is a scheduled time to run this, I had to change mine to make it run once/day. For testing you can manually run the job on the server too. I forget what the default is, it might be that the timer job only runs once/week - this is annoying since you can't see whether your policy is working correctly!

I found this post by Kim Frehe very useful when researching and configuring the information management policy. Also check out Jason's answer in this post about finding the timer job and testing it.

I can't help on your 2nd and 3rd points as I've used 'In Place Records Management'. Good luck!