It began with a simple request: “Could you just configure a couple of new retention policies for us?”

What followed revealed far more than expected. A detailed review of a Microsoft 365 tenant exposed more than 9,500 unlicensed OneDrive accounts, 11.55 TB of preserved content, and thousands of inactive mailboxes spanning years. The root cause was a single retain-only policy that blocked the deletion pipeline.

This is the invisible debt that IT architects, Microsoft 365 administrators, compliance leads, and security teams inherit without realising. It inflates storage costs, complicates governance, increases breach risk, and undermines data minimisation goals.
One of the main reasons these issues occur is the misalignment between retention, licensing, and user deletion during offboarding.

In this session, you’ll learn:
1. How mailbox and OneDrive lifecycles behave during offboarding.
2. Why removing licences doesn’t delete users or their data.
3. How compliance copies from other workloads stored in Exchange mailboxes can silently block deletion.
4. How misconfigured retention policies and eDiscovery holds preserve content indefinitely.
5. How to design a structured retention model using Adaptive Scopes to automatically apply retain-only policies to active users and retain-and-delete policies to leavers across all workloads.

You’ll leave with a clear, actionable model to stop infinite retention, clean up legacy data, and take back control of your Microsoft 365 tenant.