The End is Near for Classic eDiscovery

Why You Want to Circle August 1, 2025 on your calendar

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

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If you haven’t seen MC1002399 since it hit the Message Center a week ago, you may want to read this:

We will be retiring the classic eDiscovery, including classic Content Search, eDiscovery (Standard), and eDiscovery (Premium) from the Microsoft 365 Purview portal starting August 1, 2025, and ending September 1, 2025. Instead, we recommend the new unified eDiscovery, which is faster and easier to use, combining standard and premium features in a simpler workflow with robust reporting. We will continue to invest our development resources in the new unified eDiscovery.

If you have been putting off looking at the new eDiscovery interface, you are now on the clock. You only have about five months to learn it and adapt your workflows to fit Microsoft’s design.

I suggest you start diving in because some things you might be using in the eDiscovery tools will either look very different or not exist.

Of course, Microsoft also has five months to continue making changes and possibly adding missing features, but I’m not holding my breath that some of them will be included in the new interface.

I’m going to revisit some of the things I’ve written about before for paid subscribers, but I have some recommendations:

• If you’ve avoided looking at the preview interface, run through a test case now. Perform some searches, collect test data, export it, and familiarize yourself with the workflow. It’s different, and it will take time to get used to it.

• If you’ve reviewed it, plan to repeat your testing once a month until the release date. It will change as Microsoft prepares it for public release.

• Remain flexible - the date may change. It’s happened before with new feature releases.