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Managing eDiscovery for modern collaboration

Traditionally, eDiscovery data sources were primarily limited to email and cloud storage. However, modern organizations require eDiscovery to extend to chat-based communication and collaboration tools. This creates new challenges such as identifying people of interest (custodians) and relevant content. With the exponential growth of data, there is also a pressing need for broader visibility into ever-increasing data for review.

Today, we are pleased to share several new capabilities in Microsoft 365 to help you manage eDiscovery for Microsoft Teams and Yammer with expanded visibility into case content.

eDiscovery support for Teams

We are delighted to announce that legal hold on Microsoft Teams private channel messages is now rolling out. Legal hold is critical to preserve all message copies and help prevent tampering of content and is vital for legal investigations. Now you can apply legal hold to files and messages in private channels.

To learn more about this capability and how to include private channels in your search, read Place a Microsoft Teams user or team on legal hold.

We also recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Teams conversation reconstruction. With our built-in conversation reconstruction solution, you can identify relevant chats by using targeted queries and include contextual messages in your collection. The individual messages are threaded together and presented in the review set. From this review set you can annotate, tag, and redact entire conversations or individual messages. This will help you efficiently review and export complete dialogues without having to conduct multiple searches to understand the context around messages.

Conversation reconstruction is available today. Learn more by reading Review conversations in Advanced eDiscovery.

Image showing Custodial Data in the Microsoft 365 compliance dashboard.

Microsoft Teams conversation reconstruction threads individual messages together and is presented in the review set.

eDiscovery support for Yammer

Yammer is a critical productivity application for cross-organization collaboration and sharing. We are pleased to share that Yammer now supports eDiscovery for new networks and for existing customers in Native Mode. eDiscovery for Yammer is generally available today, and Advanced eDiscovery for Yammer is now available in public preview.

We plan to support additional capabilities such as conversation reconstruction in Advanced eDiscovery later this year. You can learn more about eDiscovery and Advanced eDiscovery for Yammer in this FAQ.

Image showing the list of locations, now including Yammer, in the Microsoft 365 compliance dashboard.

eDiscovery locations now include Yammer.

Extended visibility into case content

As the volume of data grows, the review process can be challenging. We are pleased to provide broader visibility into your Advanced eDiscovery activities.

First, we are releasing tenant-level reports. Tenant-level reports provide a view that aggregates information around custodians, data sources, communications, and cases. With this capability, you can filter your view based on various criteria and export the aggregated information for further analysis. These reports will help organizations better manage their overall eDiscovery process.

Another capability we are releasing is a customizable dashboard, which enables you to view reporting and eDiscovery data visually. You can also take bulk actions during early case assessment such as culling unresponsive data. Additionally, even before you start your review process, the dashboard can help you quickly analyze your content, identify trends or key statistics, and develop your review strategy. The dynamic dashboard is customizable so you can add, remove, and configure widgets appropriate to your case and drill down into your content through the visuals.

Image showing Custodial Data analytics in the Microsoft 365 compliance dashboard.

Customizable eDiscovery dashboard enables you to view reporting and eDiscovery data visually and take bulk actions during early case assessment.

The Advanced eDiscovery dashboard and tenant-level reports are rolling out and will be in public preview by the end of this month. Learn more about the dashboard in this article and tenant reports in this article.

Reduce risk and manage compliance with Microsoft 365

By providing eDiscovery native to the Microsoft 365 platform and by extending to include data outside of Office 365, we provide an efficient and effective way to help manage your litigation or internal investigations in-place. These eDiscovery capabilities are just one part of our broader compliance capabilities to help you manage risk and compliance.

We recently introduced native connectors to third-party systems to help you bring in the right data into your organization. The new Records Management solution lets you easily onboard and manage complex retention schedules, declare items as immutable records, and automate retention based on events. We also integrated trainable classifiers into Records Management to help categorize your records. All these capabilities complement and extend your eDiscovery activities for more efficient and effective investigations.

Finally, to help you interpret requirements and reduce legal risk from data protection laws, we also recently announced several new assessments available in public preview of Microsoft Compliance Score, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and more. You can learn more about this in our recent blog.

Get started

Many of these compliance capabilities are available in Microsoft 365 E5, and learn more about how you can trial them today by reading Try or buy a Microsoft 365 subscription.