Reflection & vision: embedding Digital Archiving into Microsoft 365
Jon Tilbury
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November 5, 2025
It’s very busy this month with the iPres Conference in New Zealand and World Digital Preservation Day in the same week. We are also approaching 10 years since Preservica became an independent software vendor, 22 years after we delivered our first Digital Preservation system to The National Archives in London. It feels like time to reflect.
Top of my mind is the poster we are presenting at iPres on the embedding of Digital Preservation into Microsoft 365, the world’s most popular information management system. This feels like a step into a new world for Digital Preservation systems. We are moving away from the clunky systems operated by experts into a world where Digital Preservation functionality is automated to such an extent that a day-to-day user is unaware they are using it. An expert may set up and tune the system in the background but it’s the users themselves that manage the content.
This seamless Digital Preservation has been a dream of mine from when I first started work in this domain two decades ago. It relies on understanding the nature of what you are archiving – SharePoint Libraries and Lists are a lot more than file stores, they have complex metadata and for Lists, multiple content files that need to be preserved inside an asset as a whole. It also needs seamless transfer, using a user interface delivered natively inside Microsoft 365 or relying on Purview records management. This enables a user logged into SharePoint to send material for preservation as part of their day-to-day SharePoint activities.
One area that has exceeded my expectations is the ability to search for preserved material whilst still logged in to SharePoint and to render that material within SharePoint using the original Microsoft Access Control List. This is a game changer, as if preserved material does disappear, it is still available natively within Microsoft 365, increasing its value and removing a large barrier to transfer.
Within Preservica, the content gets the full value of standard Digital Preservation activities, all automated so the user doesn’t need to get involved. This covers checksum calculation, multiple storage locations, format identification and characterization, and migration according to the preservation policy, either on ingest or whenever the policy changes at a later date. This level of automation is only possible because of the huge investments and innovation of the experts at Preservica, something that I am very proud of. I am also proud that we have shared our approaches with many papers, posters, panels and demonstrations at iPres and many other conferences.
No blog these days would be complete without mentioning AI.
In this context Copilot AI is being used to tag material for transfer to Preservica, and to enrich the metadata within Preservica making it more discoverable and useful. Also, the content inside Preservica can be used to train Copilot and other systems using high quality, trusted content. AI will make preservation better and preservation will drive better AI.
Of course, the preservation of material in SharePoint is only the start. We are now adding Outlook, enabling emails to be preserved according to retention rules such as “capstone” or manually. We have already done a proof of concept, preserving material out of Teams and OneDrive will follow. And the approach can also be expected to apply to other non-Microsoft systems, whatever they are designed to do.
All this feels like the culmination of decades of research and development, opening the door to making Digital Preservation business as usual rather than something you need to explain. In ten more years we will be looking back at ever more embedding and automation creating rich and diverse information sources that be trusted and used. I for one can’t wait!
