eDiscovery and Microsoft Teams: What You Need to Know

Electronic discovery can be a highly complex and time-consuming endeavor. Since so much of today's business communication has shifted to the digital realm, gathering information and putting together timelines in the course of discovery has become a highly technical pursuit. Microsoft Teams and Purview eDiscovery help to streamline the process, even when a legal query spans vast information and communication networks.

How Do Purview eDiscovery and Microsoft Teams Work Together?

These programs are part of Microsoft Office 365. Teams handles communication and shared content among groups of people within your organization, either via a desktop download or directly on the web. The program helps group members manage topics, projects, content, and conversations. It is also a document-sharing platform that allows your employees to create or upload documents for use by others on the team.

In addition, Microsoft Teams helps your organization meet compliance requirements regarding the handling and storage of customer and employee data and provides you the tools you need to review any necessary information. With the introduction of Purview eDiscovery, you will gain the improved functionality required to efficiently investigate any case, even those involving sensitive material or complex inquiries.

Communications

Meetings, groups, and chats are organized through Microsoft Teams, integrating popular apps such as Exchange and Outlook. Whenever employees or other team members share communications of any kind, they create content that may eventually become relevant to a legal inquiry and the process of discovery. This content is preserved via cloud storage for future review.

Documents

Likewise, any documents posted to Teams may prove pertinent to a legal question at some point in the future. All information posted within the framework of the program is stored and time-tracked for this possible eventuality, including shared documents.

How Do Teams and Purview eDiscovery Streamline Discovery?

When searching for specific information of legal importance in the context of a sprawling network of communications, how can a legal team hope to winnow down to the needed pieces of data?

Microsoft Teams integrates with Purview eDiscovery, providing an easy-to-use interface that guides you through the process of discovery.

Data Custodians and Hold Settings

An administrator creates a new case and begins building a draft report by defining each custodian of the data of interest. In other words, the process begins by identifying who administers the relevant communications. This could be a user who wrote an email in question or an administrator for a group chat.

Communications data are stored in one of Microsoft Teams' data sources: Mailboxes, OneDrive, or SharePoint Online, depending on the type and scope of the information. Once you've identified your custodians, these data sources will be listed for all associated data for each custodian. Mailboxes and OneDrive will be selected by default.

If there is a SharePoint site for any channel with which the custodian is associated or a team to which the custodian belongs, you will be able to select those data sources in addition to the defaults. Once you've made your selections, proceed to the hold settings to preserve all information in these sources. This step prevents changes to the data while under review.

Draft Collection and Data Filters

At this point, you are able to create what's called a draft collection, which is an estimate of all of the information that you have selected with your query thus far. You may choose to make adjustments prior to committing your report to a review set, to widen or narrow the scope of the data.

When you have all the data you feel you need in your report, you can apply conditions, filters, and date ranges to help you focus on the pertinent information.

eDiscovery often involves multiple data types: email, shared documents, instant messages from chat threads, etc. The review may look at a single day or a range of dates. Data can also be included or excluded based on a specific data point, such as the identity of the sender, keywords, subject, or various tags.

Enhancements With Purview

There are recent improvements in the discovery process with Microsoft Teams Purview eDiscovery, regarding hold reports and notifications as well as team reactions.

Hold Reports

With Purview, hold reports make it easier to determine not only which content is on legal hold but also where that data are located. You have access to a list of the specific data sources where relevant content is stored, which makes the process of locating the needed data simpler and more time efficient.

You are also able to view a list of all cases that have a hold on specific data at a glance.

Hold Notifications

Whenever content is placed on hold, custodians must be notified of the status of this data. Especially with large and complex queries, it can become very time-consuming to provide these notifications to all interested parties. Purview simplifies this process with prepared templates.

Team Reactions

Purview allows you to see all team reactions to content, in a progressive timeline. For users on legal hold, you will also have access to reactions on deleted or edited communications. This gives the reviewing party a clear picture of who reacted to which content and when.

How Should You Migrate Your Data to Office 365 for Improved Ediscovery?

At Cloudficient, we help companies retire legacy archives and migrate communications and other sensitive content securely to the cloud. We integrate Office 365 with your business data and processes.

As migration specialists, we can help you to take advantage of Microsoft Teams, the latest developments in ediscovery, and the efficiency of cloud-based storage and data management. Get in touch with us today to discuss your organization's migration needs.

With unmatched next generation migration technology, Cloudficient is revolutionizing the way businesses retire legacy systems and transform their organization into the cloud. Our business constantly remains focused on client needs and creating product offerings that match them. We provide affordable services that are scalable, fast and seamless.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Cloudficiency to your migration project, visit our website, or contact us.