Office 365 Safeguarding/Email Retention/Archive

[Garacesh]

Firstly, sorry for spamming with the O365 help threads. Alternately, are there any readable (these are annoyingly all videos) guides for modifying all the niggly bits of 365?

 

User accounts synced, location set, license applied. Sweet. Next port of call is setting up the mailboxes.

 

Outlook Web App Policies

I've found that creating a User Role that does not give the user MyDistributionGroups and MyDistributionGroupsMembership permissions, contrary to what you'd expect, does not actually stop the user creating new groups. The only way thus far I've found to stop users (in this case students) faffing about with groups is to put them on the Light version of Outlook (Outlook Web App Policies, uncheck Premium Client).. But I can't find a way to either assign polices en-masse, either through the portal or via Powershell, or change which of the policies is the default policy. We want separate policies for staff and students but want the Student to be the default policy (as a just-in-case measure).

 

Safeguarding/Prevention of Terrorism Act/Archiving/Retention Policies

As we're all aware, we have to hold emails for time in order to prove our staff aren't planning to blow stuff up. This would also be useful for safeguarding. What we want to do is block any email containing flagged phrases (kill you/u/etc, suicide, certain swears, etc) and forward it to our CPO. Standard stuff. I presume this can be done through either Content Filter or Flow Rules? I haven't looked into that too much yet.

The main issue is with figuring how to keep copies of everything. We're looking at 3 years for staff, 1 year for students, with the ability to access emails even if the user has deleted them, but the retention policies aren't exactly self-explanatory and I just can't figure this out. You'd think that Microsoft would have a guide about this, given they're targeting businesses and schools, but I just can't find anything.

In-Place Archive. Is this what I'm after? Microsoft describes it as "An archive mailbox is a specialized mailbox that appears alongside the users’ primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App. Users can access the archive in the same way that they access their primary mailboxes. In addition, they can search both their archives and primary mailboxes." which doesn't sound like what I'm after.

Edited May 5, 2015 by Garacesh