Priority Cleanup Can Remove Items Under Hold

Message Center notification MC1115304 (14 July 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 496151) trumpets the “Introduction of secure workflow to bypass retention/legal holds on OneDrive and SharePoint.” It is the logical follow-on for the original preview of Purview Priority Cleanup that was launched earlier this year that was limited to removing mailbox items. Microsoft says that the public preview of the new capability will rollout between mid- and end-August 2025 with general availability due at the end of September 2025. Priority Cleanup is a premium solution, so E5 licenses are required.

Interestingly, Microsoft emphasizes that tenants can use priority cleanup to remove Copilot-related artifacts such as Teams recordings and transcripts independently of other content stored in users’ OneDrive for Business accounts. It’s always been possible to create an auto-label retention policy to target Teams recordings to make sure that these files don’t hang around too long. The difference is that a priority cleanup permanently removes the files even when a retention policy is in place to retain them for a set period.

Cleanups Aren’t Fast

When I reviewed Priority Cleanup in March 2025, I reported how Microsoft built the solution from several existing components and, while this approach is effective, it means that a priority cleanup can be quite slow to find, process, approve, and finally remove items. Don’t expect a cleanup to be a speedy operation, especially in large tenants, especially when hundreds or thousands of items are identified for checking.

The big selling point for Priority Cleanup is its ability to ignore retention holds. Let’s say that a tenant decides to remove all items associated with a specific project. The scope for the search might be a set of SharePoint Online sites and the OneDrive for Business accounts and mailboxes belonging to project members. A general retention policy of five years might apply to email and seven years to SharePoint and OneDrive. Priority Cleanup searches the target locations to find matching items, presents them for approval by a different administrator to the person who created the cleanup policy, and actions the decisions of that approver. If the decision is to remove items, Purview permanently erases the items from their host locations, ignoring retention policies, retention labels (including those that apply preservation lock), and eDiscovery or litigation holds. The documentation covers other details, including how items in eDiscovery review sets are processed and when a separate approval by a retention administrator is needed.

Who Needs to Ignore Retention?

The question is who needs to ignore the holds imposed by Purview Lifecycle management, Exchange MRM, or eDiscovery? It’s often true that email needs to be removed from mailboxes because some malware got through or someone posted something that they shouldn’t have. The latter case can be handled by Exchange’s much-improved message recall facility, at least within the tenant boundary. All bets are off when email escapes from the tenant. Removing malware is more problematic since the demise of the Search-Mailbox cmdlet. A compliance search purge action or eDiscovery purge will move the offending messages out of sight from user eyes, but the messages remain in mailboxes until any retention holds expire. Quite how much extra value is gained from removing the items before retention expires is debatable.

Things are different for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Purge actions don’t work for files and there’s never been an equivalent of a Search-Mailbox cmdlet for these locations. The two-phase recycle bin arrangement followed by retention (if needed) in the preservation hold library is more complex, especially when multiple versions of files are retained. Given the additional factors, it’s unsurprising that Microsoft has taken longer to create priority cleanup for SharePoint and OneDrive. However, the same question arises: who needs this feature?

Some Tenants Need to Remove Material

Answering myself, Microsoft must have a body of evidence from customers attesting to the need for priority cleanup. And I guess that if the process is managed properly with due regard to the need to keep business records and whatever other material is mandated by law, then priority cleanup has its place. It will be interesting to hear how tenants use this capability.

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