I was going to take this week off from sending the newsletter out, in preparation for some larger testing I’m working on, and to give you all a break.
However, I recently spent some time working with a client answering some questions about the new eDiscovery interface, and one of their questions seemed rather odd to me. They couldn’t delete searches. I had seen that feature and written about it before, and I was certain it was working, so I went back and tested it again.
It worked fine.
Then I remembered that, when gathering background information from this client, they were working in another customer’s tenant as eDiscovery Managers as opposed to Administrators. Those two roles have existed for years, and the only difference I have ever seen between them is that Managers could only access cases they created or were given access to, while Admins could access all of the cases.
Once the user was inside a case, however, there was no real difference in what they had permission to do.
I decided to log in with a user who was an eDiscovery Manager instead of an Administrator, and sure enough, my attempt to delete a search was met with this 403 error.
403 errors usually indicate that I do not have permission to perform an action.
Apparently, if you’re in the eDiscovery Manager role, you can’t delete a search in the new UI, as of today. Hopefully, that will change. There are plenty of instances where that would be necessary. Is it a bug, or has Microsoft started reserving some actions for users in the eDiscovery Administrators group?
I wouldn’t be surprised either way, but if you’ve seen some documentation about this, I’d love to see it!
The larger lesson, though, is about testing with the Administrator role. I’ve gotten away with that for years because, again, there was no difference in what each role could do inside of a case, but I’m now making a note to test with both roles, just in case.
In fact, I’m going to take some time to review some of my previous testing with the Manager role, just in case. 😏
You’ll be the first to know if I find any other surprises!
Have you seen any surprising behavior in the new UI?
New on the blog this week:
Worth Reading - Beyond Chat: The Hidden Dominoes When You Create a Microsoft Team
Everything about Teams—security, retention, eDiscovery, privacy, and so on— starts with understanding the data involved. To understand the data involved, you need to be familiar with all the details of this chain reaction.
Worth Reading - Moving sales, service, and finance to the Frontier with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Instead of paying an extra fee for the Sales, Service, and Finance Copilots, they will be included as part of the Copilot for the M365 license. For no additional fees.
I want to be charitable and say that this doesn't reek slightly of desperation, but is instead a strategic decision, possibly to be followed by a price increase next year. Or even that they are trying to lessen the confusion around the different versions of Copilot.