The Hazards of eDiscovery with Microsoft's e3 license

How quickly we forgot Purview Standard eDiscovery

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

Last week I was wrapping up some testing as part of my day job where I was taking a look at Teams data storage and collection and it suddenly occurred to me that over the last year or two, Microsoft has done a lot to assist eDiscovery professionals when dealing with Teams data in Premium eDiscovery. During that same time, they’ve done nothing for those using Standard.

What’s a poor eDiscovery pro working in a company with just e3 licensing supposed to do?

More to the point in this newsletter though, I realized that we’ve hinted around at the fact that there are features in Premium eDiscovery that don’t exist in Standard, but I’ve never really tried to document them, and where being an e3 shop is going to be difficult from an eDiscovery perspective.

First, let’s point out the obvious, Microsoft has stopped development on Standard eDiscovery. Even a rumored update that would allow users to download exports without using a one-click executable hasn’t ever appeared. (Much to the chagrin of Mac users or anyone where corporate security would block downloaded executables.) The new search interface that exists in Purview has never made an appearance in Standard either, and I don’t expect it ever will.

But there’s much more than that missing when it comes to working with Standard eDiscovery.