Everything you want to know about Office 365 File Plan Manager

What is Office 365 File Plan Manager? It is an advanced management capability for retention, labels, and policies. And it provides an integrated way to traverse label and label to content activity for your entire content lifecycle.

File plan manager is available with an Office 365 E5 license, or the Office 365 advanced compliance add-on. It’s a way to keep your labels and your retention policies more organized. It also allows you to perform both actions on the labels and policies to make administration easier.

Add categories to organize labels in File Plan Manager

You can add categorization to organize labels in File Plan Manager. There are a couple of fields that you can add to your labels to make them easier to find, sort, and filter.

Firstly, you can add a reference ID, this is a freeform field, and you can populate anything that you would like in this field. A lot of people use it as their reference ID against their formal file plan and retention schedule.

Secondly, you can select the business function or department to which this label applies. They have some pre-populated options available, or you’re welcome to create your business function or department. Next, you’re able to categorize the label. Again, there are some pre-populated suggestions, but you’re welcome to create your own.

Thirdly, if you would like you’re able to add a sub-category, therefore making this a hierarchical file plan. Again, anything can go here.

Next, you can select the authority type to track why the label exists. Some pre-populated examples include business, legal, or regulatory. But again, you’re welcome to add your authority type.

Finally, if you would like, you can tie the label to a specific provision or citation. Microsoft has pre-populated SIM, as examples, and one of those is Sarbanes- Oxley or SOX compliance. It provides the name of the provision or citation and a link to the specific regulation.

View the life cycle of labels and content

The file plan manager allows you to view the lifecycle of labels and content. Firstly, you’re able to see the activity of a label. This activity is like the label activity that you would see through label analytics. But it allows you to see just a view of one specific labels activity.

Next, you can view all items across SharePoint OneDrive and exchange that have this label in use. You did this by selecting the location, for example, SharePoint and OneDrive for business. Then you would select the secondary location, for example, a site or a specific user’s OneDrive.

Then finally, you can see the specific item URLs to which you applied the label. If you click open item, please note that it’s going to open the item in your office client application or equivalent desktop application.

Next, you can view all items with this label that are pending disposition review. Then finally, you can see all the disposed of items in one single view.

Export labels to Excel using File Plan Manager

The next feature in file plan manager that’s very helpful is that you’re able to export your entire file plan into an excel CSV file for further analysis. Here you can see all of the options available for when you create labels, and you can sort and filter based on these criteria to have a better view of your file plan.

Similarly, you’re also able to bulk create labels by populating them in that excel CSV file and then importing them. This approach allows you to save time by creating these labels in bulk instead of having to go through a wizard to create each label.

Bulk create labels

Finally, you’re able to bulk publish labels once they’ve been created using a retention policy. You can select all the labels from the file plan that you would like to include in the retention policy. Click publish selected labels, and then go through the retention policy creation wizard.

We hope you enjoyed this overview of Microsoft Office 365 File Plan Manager.