Is Advanced Retention coming to Business Premium?

I commonly hear people in the Information Management community suggesting that you can’t manage records in Microsoft 365 without E5 licences. While this message is certainly based in truth, it’s not entirely accurate. There is another option to consider: the Microsoft E5 Compliance add-on licence.

It’s probably best to think of the Microsoft E5 Compliance add-on licence and its sibling, the Microsoft E5 Security add-on, as options to access some of the premium features if you don’t have E5 licences. For example, if E3 provides you with everything you need, except retention (where let’s face it, it probably falls short), then the E5 Compliance add-on might be perfect for you.

Excitingly, a blog post was recently published on Microsoft’s Tech Community, which announced that that the Microsoft E5 Compliance add-on will be made available for organisations using Business Premium from late August 2025. Strangely, at the time of writing this blog post, it has since disappeared (so take everything here with a large pinch of salt until we see full confirmation). If true, this will be a significant step forward for anyone using Business Premium, as it might actually allow you to get serious about managing records in Microsoft 365!

Personally, I’m keeping my fingers-crossed, as this add-on will make best practice records management architectures viable for organisations with Business Premium licences!

What might organisations with Business Premium gain from E5 Compliance?

The Microsoft E5 Compliance add-on provides access to a wealth of advanced Microsoft Purview capabilities. I’ve put together a short list of some of the highlights for Records Managers:

• Apply default retention labels on libraries/folders

• Use adaptive scopes

• Ability to automatically apply retention labels (via Sensitive Information Types; Trainable Classifiers; or via Keyword Query)

• Use immutable record labels

• Trigger the start of retention when an event occurs

• End a retention period with a disposition review

• Trigger a Power Automate process (or change the retention label automatically) at the end of a retention period)

  
  

Basically, without access to the capabilities provided by E5 Compliance, organisations will need to ask staff to manually apply retention labels on every file. Let’s face it, this simply won’t work for most organisations!

It’s worth noting that E5 Compliance isn’t all about retention. The licence also provides access to a wealth of other capabilities including:

• Insider Risk Management

• Communication Compliance

• EndPoint Data Loss Prevention 

• Automatic application of Sensitivity Labels 

• Information Protection Scanner

• Trainable Classifiers

• Sensitive Information Types

• eDiscovery (Premium)

• Audit (Premium)

• Defender for Cloud Apps