Microsoft announced that they have conquered unified cloud storage and migrated all of your M365 ESI to a secured, secret Syntex Alternative Reality Services platform that contains all of mankind’s ESI. This unified information pool has catalyzed the first General Artificial Intelligence code named AZURENET. Your M365 tithes will be increasing to match your income and your personal CoPilot will have your calendar completely booked with Teams meetings. It will generate all of your agendas, notes and tasks, even if you do not understand them. Just keep taking your blue pill and everything will revert to normal after this April Fool’s Day drill has concluded.
And now back to our regularly scheduled monthly update after our Foolish tale.
Microsoft Roadmap: March 2024
Despite the relatively large number of updates, there are few with any major eDiscovery impact.
My blog on the new Purview Legal Holds Report already covered the biggest recent release for Purview eDiscovery. Still no preview of the new Purview eDiscovery UI. Stay tuned for roadmap items as they drop. As a reminder, all feature IDs link directly to the actual Microsoft Roadmap. The impact score and eDJ comment are added to express my current opinion on the potential impact of the changes, which may change when I get actual access to the new features.
| Feature | Impact | eDJ | Description | Details | Tags – Product | Tags – Release phase | Release | Last Modified |
| 164191 | 5 | The combination of collaborative Teams meeting recordings and Loop meeting notes poses a challenge to eDiscovery/compliance teams. | Microsoft Stream: Collaborative notes in Teams meeting recordings | This feature enables users to view and edit collaborative meeting notes while watching Teams meeting recordings in Stream. Collaborative notes allow meeting attendees to co-create and collaborate on their meeting agenda, notes, and action items. Since Collaborative notes are a Loop component, it is always in sync regardless of how many places they live in. Assigned tasks in collaborative meeting notes automatically sync with To Do & Planner. | Microsoft Stream | General Availability, Targeted Release | 11/1/2023 | 3/8/2024 |
| 171751 | 4 | Potential high value for corporate legal teams in scoping legal holds and discovery request terms. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – Review set query report | Within a review set, generate and download a hit-by-term report on a KQL query. Quickly see the count and volume of the items hit on a particular keyword or a list of compound queries. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | General Availability, Preview | 7/1/2024 | 3/28/2024 |
| 93268 | 4 | Aggregated hold reports in Purview is great news. Unfortunately they do not include metrics or detailed custodial/source information. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery (Premium) – Hold reports | Out-of-the-box reports that contain information about all legal holds associated with eDiscovery cases in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Sort and filter your view based on various criteria and download the aggregated information for further analysis. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | General Availability, Preview | 4/1/2024 | 3/18/2024 |
| 93269 | 4 | Since legal holds are the primary usage case for Purview eDiscovery customers, having hold reports and aggregated data could have high value depending on actual implementation. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery (Premium) – Hold reports (U.S. Government clouds) | Out-of-the-box reports that contain information about all legal holds associated with eDiscovery cases in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. Sort and filter your view based on various criteria and download the aggregated information for further analysis. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | General Availability | 3/1/2024 | 1/4/2024 |
| 117508 | 4 | This expansion of the GraphAPI should enable integration partners to fully automate search, retrieval and processing within the partner review platform. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery (Premium) – Export API | The Export function plays an integral role in eDiscovery. After a review set is added, with use of this Export API, organizations can create export jobs and get the download URL to successfully download the export created in a programmatic manner. This API will enable external applications and partners to successfully integrate the eDiscovery export function through scripting. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | General Availability, Preview | 6/1/2023 | 1/24/2024 |
| 180900 | 3 | LLM driven email summarization may have impact on content and search/review depending on implementation. Looking for whether and how the generated content is stored. Stay tuned. | Outlook: Classic Outlook for Windows – Summarize by Copilot | Copilot combines the power of LLMs and Outlook data to help you do more. Copilot can summarize email threads and extract key points. | Outlook, Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365) | Current Channel | 11/1/2023 | 4/1/2024 |
| 160010 | 3 | Users should be aware that Purview currently does not run OCR on embedded images within PDFs, Office or container files. Only stand alone images. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: Optical character recognition (OCR) support for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business | Optical character recognition (OCR) support will detect sensitive content in images and subsequently apply data loss prevention (DLP) policies to prevent exfiltration of that sensitive data in SharePoint Online and OneDrive. This release supports key file types like JPG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, and PDF (image-only PDF). | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | Preview, General Availability | 8/1/2024 | 3/5/2024 |
| 124840 | 3 | Indeed, Copilot is slowly evolving and eDiscovery needs to understand how to differentiate GenAI vs. user content. | SharePoint: Copilot in SharePoint | Copilot in SharePoint combines the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), your data in the Microsoft Graph, and best practices to create engaging web content. Use a brief prompt to generate custom sites and pages with content hierarchy, design, and sample content that aligns with user needs. And all within our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise. | SharePoint | General Availability, Targeted Release (Entire Organization), Targeted Release, Preview, Targeted Release (Select People) | 5/1/2024 | 3/28/2024 |
| 124940 | 3 | See 171100. Expansion of automatic OCR on standard file types for higher search quality. | Microsoft Syntex: Optical Character Recognition in OneDrive and SharePoint supports multi-page PDF and TIFF files | Currently, OCR is available only for standalone Images. With this update image-only PDF and TIFF files in OneDrive and SharePoint will also benefit from OCR. | Microsoft Syntex | General Availability | 12/1/2023 | 2/2/2024 |
| 169083 | 3 | This has high potential value for internal ‘citizen developers’ and external partners to leverage automation through the API. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – App Permissions for Graph API | Now organizations who are automating eDiscovery workflows will be able to authenticate and execute workflows with an application based authentication method. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | General Availability | 6/1/2024 | 1/4/2024 |
| 380184 | 3 | While HTML versions of Loop components will ease reviewer burden, users should be given the option to select export format. Export in HTML format may not suffice for criminal/regulatory investigations | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery – Enhancements for eDiscovery support of Loop content | Now eDiscovery admins can review Loop components created in Outlook or Teams within eDiscovery (Premium) as rendered HTML files to help understand the content that has been created within the Loop component. Once the component has been reviewed, it can then be exported as an HTML file to meet the requirements of the case. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | General Availability | 2/1/2024 | 1/25/2024 |
| 180170 | 3 | This improves the ability to have contractors, external firms or managed service providers managing large scale processing without granting them eDiscovery Administrator rights. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal: eDiscovery (Premium) Jobs report – access for eDiscovery Manager | The access to the Jobs Report in eDiscovery (Premium) will be extended to eDiscovery Managers. eD Managers will be able to view the tenant wide quota available and list of jobs in the cases they have access to. | Microsoft Purview compliance portal | General Availability, Preview | 1/1/2024 | 1/18/2024 |
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Book a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call if he has availability. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer an investigative journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being published. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations.
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