Maintaining a Microsoft 365 Retention Policy with PowerShell

Connect-IPPSSession with Azure Automation

The Connect-IPPSSession cmdlet is needed to connect to the Security and Compliance endpoint to update a Microsoft 365 retention policy. Unhappily, the Security and Compliance module doesn’t support managed identities, which makes it harder to run Connect-IPPSSession securely in an Azure Automation runbook. In the end, we use a credential stored in the automation account. And then we had to disable WAM. All explained here.

Creating a Microsoft 365 Retention Policy for Shared Mailboxes

shared mailboxes and microsoft 365 retention policies

After being asked whether licenses are needed to include shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365 retention policies, I investigated and found that licenses are not. This led to a consideration of the steps needed to create a special retention policy for shared mailboxes (with PowerShell, naturally) and how to avoid retention setting collisions with other policies. All explained in detail here.

How to Use a Inactive Mailbox Retention Policy to Manage Inactive Mailboxes

Most Microsoft 365 tenants will have to manage the mailboxes of ex-employees. Retention policies are an excellent method to achieve this goal, if you remember to add mailboxes to a suitable retention policy before deleting their Azure AD account. In this article, we consider Microsoft’s recommendation to use a specific retention policy for inactive mailboxes and how to go about using such a policy.