Out with the old

An end to legacy records management in Microsoft 365

Last weekend Microsoft updated their roadmap to announce the retirement of some of the legacy records management capabilities found in Microsoft 365. Specifically, in April 2026 we will see the following functionality removed:

• In-Place Records Management

• Information Management policies

• Document deletion policies

• Policies for site closure and deletion

  
  

This announcement isn’t exactly surprising, I’ve been urging people to upgrade for years now, but with only 4 months to react, any organisation still relying on these legacy capabilities is going to have a huge amount of work to do in very little time.

One slight surprise for me is that legacy Record Centers aren’t included in this announcement. I can only guess that Records Centers  are still used by enough organisation to make it difficult to retire this year. It’s worth highlighting that Information Management Policies were central to the way that Record Centers worked, so even though Record Centers aren’t being retired this April, they are certainly being stripped of much of their power.

You can find out more about this forthcoming change by searching for MC1211579 in the Microsoft 365 Message Center.

What to do if this change impacts you?

Act fast! You will need to work quickly to assess how this change will affect your records. It will be important to capture a snapshot of how many records are affected by this change and quite how existing capabilities have been configured.

You will then want to plan for the introduction of a replacement approach for managing records in Microsoft 365. I’d suggest that retention labels and retention policies should really be at the heart of this new solution.

Do get in touch if you want to ask any questions about this process – I’m certainly happy to try to steer you in the right direction.