Search by File in Purview

Also, a programming announcement.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Before we dive into this new search feature I discovered in the new Purview eDiscovery interface, I want to provide a scheduling update.

As some of you know, the regular schedule for publishing this newsletter is three weeks on and then one week off. Typically, that is a deep dive for paid subscribers, a free news roundup, a second deep dive, and a break.

However, taking this week off seemed silly with the upcoming holidays, so I’m looking at a new feature instead. Next week, I’ll do a news roundup for December and then take two weeks off.

This newsletter is sent on Tuesdays. Sending it on December 24th and 31st seems pointless. I hope that whatever those days might look like for you, you’ve got something better to do than read about M365 eDiscovery.

If nothing else, watch Diehard or something.

With that out of the way, I wanted to share that when I was searching in the new Purview eDiscovery interface, I noticed an extra option: search by file.

I was intrigued.

Unfortunately, the link above to learn more about searching by file takes me to the default documentation that only repeats what we see here. So, it’s not really giving me “more.”

Then again, this seems pretty straightforward. Upload a text or CSV file and search for similar content.

The description mentions using this for investigations, but I think there is also an eDiscovery workflow here, as there usually is when people talk about investigating data.

How often does your team wonder if there are documents that a targeted search isn’t finding or if they have managed to avoid your keyword searching? It happens. I could see, in some circumstances, that being useful.

I could even see that the CSV option from an audit search is useful when determining what a person of interest was doing in M365.