Preserving Our Digital Future: Streamlining Records Transfer in the Microsoft 365 Era

In today's hyper-connected world, information is the lifeblood of any organization. From crucial business records to invaluable cultural heritage, digital content fuels decision-making, drives innovation and preserves our collective memory.

But simply storing information isn’t enough—organizations must ensure that records remain accessible, secure and compliant over time. This requires careful management of record transfers, protection of high-value content and the right tools to maintain compliance.

Preservica’s recent Education Series on Turning Digital Preservation for Microsoft 365 into a reality, hosted in partnership with IRMS and ARA, provides practical insights into navigating the complexities of Digital Preservation within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. While the series focuses on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, the strategies and best practices shared are valuable for any organization looking to strengthen its Digital Preservation efforts.

This blog will serve to cover three essential themes:

• Streamlining the transfer of records

• Prioritizing the identification and protection of high-value, long-term SharePoint content

• Providing a practical guide to retention, records management and archiving capabilities within Microsoft 365 Purview and beyond

First, it's important to understand the distinction between basic archiving and true Digital Preservation—because ensuring long-term access to records requires more than just storing them away.

The Difference Between Archiving and Digital Preservation

Effective records management is about ensuring accessibility, authenticity and long-term usability. Many organizations rely on basic archiving and backup solutions, which help with short-term data recovery but often fall short of long-term preservation.

Digital Preservation goes beyond simple storage by actively managing records throughout their lifecycle, ensuring their integrity even as technology evolves.

“It's not just something that happens when we come to decide to archive or appraise content for long-term storage. It's something that should be embedded throughout the entire life cycle of content." - Ren Lemming, IRMS

Key Strategies for Efficient Record Transfer

Before diving into the specific strategies, it's essential to highlight how Preserve365® plays a critical role in facilitating efficient record transfers within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. By leveraging Preserve365, organizations can streamline processes such as metadata preservation, secure transfers, and automation, ensuring the long-term accessibility and integrity of their records.

Here are some key strategies to make these processes even more effective.

1. Establish Standardized Processes

A structured approach to transferring records improves efficiency and ensures consistency. Best practices include:

• Metadata Planning: Applying consistent tags to enhance searchability and retrieval.

• Review Workflows: Implementing clear approval processes before transferring records.

• Secure Transfers: Using secure protocols to maintain data integrity during transfers.

2. Automate Where Possible

Automation reduces manual effort and enhances scalability. Key automation approaches within Microsoft 365 include:

• Manual Transfers with Metadata: Preserve365 enables bulk transfers from SharePoint while retaining metadata, ensuring comprehensive archival records.

• Microsoft Purview Integration: Retention labels in Microsoft Purview can automate archiving, embedding preservation policies into governance frameworks.

• Power Automate Workflows: Custom workflows can trigger archiving based on file types, expiration dates, or other conditions.

3. Addressing Obsolete File Types

One major challenge in Digital Preservation is ensuring access to outdated file formats. Preserve365 mitigates this by creating multiple representations of each file:

• Original Format: Maintains authenticity.

• Preservation Format: Converts files into widely supported formats.

• Access Format: Ensures immediate usability.
  This approach guarantees that even legacy files remain accessible over time.

4. Preserving Metadata and Ensuring Integrity

Metadata is crucial for maintaining the context and value of digital records. Preserve365 ensures that metadata remains intact throughout the archiving process. Additionally, robust integrity checks and audit trails reinforce legal admissibility, providing confidence in the authenticity of preserved records.

By implementing these best practices, organizations can ensure that their digital records remain accessible, authentic and protected for the long term. Next up, we will explore additional strategies for safeguarding high-value SharePoint content and maximizing Microsoft 365 Purview’s capabilities.

Prioritizing and Protecting Your Most Valuable Content

The modern workplace runs on information, with Microsoft SharePoint serving as a central hub for collaboration and content storage. However, as data accumulates, organizations face the challenge of distinguishing valuable records from everyday clutter.

Prioritizing and protecting high-value content is essential for compliance, decision-making and long-term knowledge retention. This section explores key strategies for identifying critical information, implementing proactive governance and ensuring effective Digital Preservation.

The SharePoint Challenge: A Sea of Data

SharePoint's popularity as a collaboration and document management platform has led to an unprecedented accumulation of digital information. While this offers undeniable benefits, it also creates a complex landscape for records managers and archivists.

John Chambers, Chief Executive and company secretary at Ara suggests, "SharePoint content is growing at a headlong rate and as records managers and archivists, we have a role to play in ensuring that this growing digital heap or iceberg of data is understood and properly governed and protected, especially content that is of high value and long term importance to your organization, whether that is to mitigate risk or to unlock value."

This challenge is further compounded by the rapid pace of content creation in the digital age. Modern tools and collaborative platforms generate new data at an astonishing rate, making it difficult to keep up with classification and management.

"There are very sophisticated tools available in the Microsoft platform which will generate content, new content, duplicate content, at a much faster pace than we saw in the traditional way of network, file shares, or, you know, or kind of a folder, directory, type of systems."

The Importance of Proactive Governance

Effective information governance is a necessity. Organizations must move beyond reactive approaches and embrace proactive strategies for managing their digital assets. This involves:

• Identifying High-Value Content: Determining which information is critical for business operations, compliance, or historical preservation.

• Implementing Classification Schemes: Developing and applying consistent metadata tags and labels to organize and categorize content.

• Establishing Retention Policies: Defining clear rules for how long different types of information should be kept.

• Enforcing Data Protection Controls: Implementing measures to secure sensitive information and prevent unauthorized access.

Navigating the Microsoft 365 Landscape

Microsoft 365 offers a range of tools and capabilities that can support effective information governance. These include:

• SharePoint Metadata: Provides a foundation for organizing and classifying content within SharePoint.

• Retention and Sensitivity Labels: Enable the application of policies for retention, disposition and access control.

• Microsoft Purview: Offers a comprehensive suite of tools for information governance, including auto-classification and retention management.

• Power Automate: Facilitates the creation of custom workflows for automating information management tasks.

However, even with these powerful tools, organizations often struggle to implement effective governance. One common challenge is the sheer volume of existing data. "We see that as a real issue overall, because in large corporate spaces, in large unstructured spaces, data often is out of sight, out of mind." - Vivek Bhatt, CTO at Infotechtion

Prioritizing High-Value Content
With limited resources and vast data, organizations should focus on high-value content first. Instead of overhauling entire systems, a strategic approach is to identify, classify and protect critical assets, then address redundant or obsolete content later. This ensures quick control over essential information, laying the groundwork for broader governance efforts.

Integrating with Digital Preservation Solutions
For long-term preservation, integrating with specialized Digital Preservation platforms is crucial. These platforms safeguard high-value content by ensuring its accessibility and readability as technology evolves. By combining SharePoint with these solutions, organizations can protect their most important data for future generations.

By prioritizing key content and using Microsoft 365 tools, organizations can lay a solid foundation for effective records management and long-term data protection. Next, let’s explore how to master retention, records management and archiving in Microsoft 365 for sustainable governance.

Beyond the Basics: Mastering Retention, Records Management and Archiving in Microsoft 365

Mastering retention, records management and archiving in Microsoft 365 means using its features to manage the full information lifecycle. This includes setting retention policies, ensuring proper records management and archiving key content to stay compliant and accessible over time.

Data Lifecycle Management: A Multifaceted Approach

Data lifecycle management involves addressing compliance, cost optimization and data security. Bernd Vellguth, Technical Specialist for Risk Management & Compliance at Microsoft explains, "Data lifecycle management involves several key aspects. On one hand, there's the need to retain and manage records for compliance purposes. On the other hand, there's a focus on resilience, which includes backing up data and protecting against ransomware. Additionally, personal archives play a role, as well as strategies for reducing costs."

Microsoft 365 provides a comprehensive suite of tools to address these various aspects, including:

• Microsoft Purview: The core platform for data lifecycle management and records management, offering capabilities for classification, retention, disposition and auditing.

• Backup and Recovery Solutions: Integrated tools for protecting data against loss or corruption, including cloud-based backups and versioning.

• Insider Risk Management: Features for detecting and mitigating risks associated with insider threats, such as data leakage or sabotage.

• Archiving Capabilities: Options for moving data to lower-cost storage tiers, such as Exchange Online archiving and SharePoint site archiving.

Retention and Records Management with Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview forms the cornerstone of data lifecycle management within Microsoft 365. It provides a robust framework for classifying and managing information throughout its lifecycle. Key capabilities include:

• Retention Labels: Enable the application of specific retention policies to individual documents or emails, ensuring that information is kept for the required duration.

• Retention Policies: Allow for the application of broad retention rules to entire sites, mailboxes, or teams, providing a baseline for information governance.

• Records Management: Provides the ability to declare documents as records, making them immutable and preventing further editing.

• Disposition Review: Enables the review of information before it is permanently deleted, ensuring that valuable information is not inadvertently lost.

Scaling Information Governance with Adaptive Scopes
Microsoft Purview allows organizations to apply granular retention policies using adaptive scopes, based on user roles, departments, or project lifecycles. For example, a project site can be set to delete one year after completion, providing tailored retention controls.

Addressing Insider Risks
Microsoft 365's Insider Risk Management solution, integrated with Purview, helps protect against insider threats. It automatically applies retention labels to content modified or deleted by high-risk users, preserving critical information in case of sabotage or data leakage.

Archiving for Cost Optimization
Data lifecycle management also includes cost optimization. Microsoft 365 offers archiving options like Exchange Online Archiving and SharePoint Site Archiving, allowing organizations to move data to lower-cost storage while maintaining accessibility and searchability.

Integrating with Third-Party Solutions
For organizations with legacy content, Microsoft 365 provides integration options with third-party platforms, streamlining content management by importing data from systems like OpenText, Documentum and FileNet, reducing complexity.

To ensure your organization's digital content remains accessible, secure and compliant over time, implementing a comprehensive Digital Preservation strategy is essential. Preserve365® seamlessly integrates Preservica's Active Digital Preservation™ into Microsoft 365, providing a robust solution for archiving, governance and access. This integration ensures that your critical records remain protected and accessible in the latest readable formats over decades.

To learn more about how Preserve365® can enhance your organization's information governance, visit preservica.com.