Upcoming retirement of the Purview Premium eDiscovery tool

Don't let the lost features catch you by surprise. Plus, a little search bug in that new interface.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

It’s almost here.

The classic eDiscovery (Premium) experience will be retired in August 2025 and won't be available as an experience option in the Microsoft Purview portal after retirement.

We recommend that you start planning for this transition early and start using the new eDiscovery experience in the Microsoft Purview portal.

Before we dive into a bug related to searching for Teams messages using the “kind” parameter in the new interface for paid subscribers, I want to give folks a quick overview of what we are about to lose when Premium eDiscovery goes away.

Reports on data added to a review set.

This is a sample of the information available to me on the screen when running a collection and adding the results to a review set in Premium today, versus running the same query and adding to a review set in the new interface.

Premium:

New interface:

The review set in the new interface had 59 items. How did we go from 75 search hits to 59 documents collected for review? I have some ideas because I know the tool is gathering additional linked attachments and combining multiple messages into a conversation. What I don’t see is any reporting to that effect.

After some unsavory language about Microsoft and more time clicking around than I should probably admit, I found where that data is hiding.

On the Processes Tab, find the Add to Review Set process that matches up with your Review Set.

Click the Download Report button

Inside the Summary report, you’ll find the same list.

Hold Reports - Not immediately.

The new interface does not have hold reports. It’s on the roadmap for a November rollout, but until then, if you want to know what is currently on hold, you’ll need to program a way to export that data using the API. (At least I think it is, if you look at the title, it includes eDiscovery (Premium), but I think that’s because they literally took the old roadmap item from when it was released there and copied it with a new release date.)

I assume this PowerShell solution will continue to work, but I know many eDiscovery pros do not have a role that would allow them to use it.

Here’s hoping the rollout doesn’t get pushed back!

No importing non-365 data.

Also, a roadmap item.

Lack of Communication.

If you’re looking to send hold notices to your users from the eDiscovery tool, that will no longer be available.

I’m not 100% surprised by this. Microsoft’s “Communication” tab never lived up to the promise. Compared to other hold notification tools in the legal tech world, it had significant feature gaps. I guess they quit trying to compete in this area.

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It’s not all bad news, though.

• You no longer need an executable running in Edge to download your exports.

• The ability to add managers, direct reports, frequent collaborators, groups, etc., when running a query based on an individual could be helpful.

• The keyword query report in the Review Set is nice. The roadmap item for an advanced query editor sounds promising.

• Everything is done from one consistent interface. No more going back and forth between Standard, Premium, and Content Search. All of the features exist in one place. If you’re in a mixed licensing environment, though, this could get ugly. The e5 features will work on mailboxes that have other licenses, and it’ll be very easy to cross that line without realizing it when you’re always in one tool, and wind up out of compliance.

I expect there to be some pain next week for many of us. I hope you’ve got a plan to adjust your workflows accordingly!

This issue is getting a bit long, so I’ll wrap it up. Looking forward to hearing how the adjustment goes for everyone after the Labor Day holiday in the US. I’ll also have some surprises next week that I’m working hard on behind the scenes, including, yes, the new domain this newsletter is using. (https://newsletter.mikemcbride365.com) There’s more where that came from!

Now about that bug: