Microsoft Planner and eDiscovery

According to the Roadmap this should be simple. It's not.

Photo by Jens Herrndorff on Unsplash

M365 Roadmap item 399550 was rolled out in July. The description seems pretty straightforward:

Microsoft Planner: eDiscovery Support for Microsoft Planner

Conduct a content search for eDiscovery and legal hold on Planner tasks in Microsoft Purview. The Planner data available for eDiscovery includes tasks shared with groups, along with the comments and attachments associated with those tasks.

You can get more information from the Message Center, including a link to the related documentation.

This all seems well-organized, with documentation available before the change was rolled out and a defined process laid out in that documentation.

Unfortunately, that’s all the positive words I have to say about this.

Buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride.

I’m leaving this bit above the paywall because everyone in eDiscovery needs to understand this. Paid subscribers will get a more detailed description of what else I found during testing, but I need to point out that the documentation is just plain wrong.

Before we get there, though, I also need to point out where this Purview feature doesn’t exist:

the features covered in this article are only available in tenants created before October 2022. If you have a tenant that was created after October 2022, you will not have access to these features.

Unsupported: Personal (roster) plans, plans in Loop components, premium plans (formerly projects)

I assume there is some technical difference between tenants created before and after Oct. 22, but Microsoft doesn’t provide many details. I’m not impressed that an eDiscovery feature depends on how old your tenant is.

I’m likewise not impressed that personal plans are still completely hidden from eDiscovery and investigation tools in M365. Imagine that a user can create a weekly reminder to withdraw money from corporate accounts without the organization having a tool to discover that task. Not many users will figure out how to make a personal (roster) plan when they could use To-Do, but it’s not impossible. I figured it out.

Alas, that’s not the biggest problem with the documentation. This is.

For Planner data, select the SharePoint site associated with the plan and check the box for Planner tasks. Review the summary of the hold and select Create this hold to apply it to the selected locations and content.

When a hold is applied, the task won't be deleted and is copied to the Preservation Hold Library of the SharePoint site. To validate that the hold is working, you can try to delete a Planner task that matches the hold conditions and then run a new collection and add it to the review set. The compound path of the task in the review set should include PreservationHoldLibrary in the path.

That sounds very nice, except:

1. There is no checkbox for Planner tasks when setting a hold in either eDiscovery tool.

2. Planner tasks are not stored in SharePoint.

If you followed the instructions above to place Planner tasks on hold, you would preserve zero tasks. The truth becomes obvious a paragraph later when the documentation instructs us to search for Planner tasks by the ItemClass.

ItemClass is a metadata parameter available in Exchange. Using it to search those SharePoint sets you placed on hold would create a dropped filter. It does not apply to SharePoint.

If you walk away with anything from this newsletter issue, let it be this - do not look for Planner tasks in SharePoint.

We’re not done on this wild ride yet. Let’s dig into testing.