Paul Korm wrote:

@Ken, I have worked at implementing very large M365 (nee O365)
installations in government -- I assume that is what your agency is
running on. The short story is that the underlying infrastructure to do
what you want to do is there. M365 has very robust tools and metadata
that can be used to mark the data (emails, documents, messages, etc.) in
multiple ways. You might want to look into, for example, the advanced
e-discovery features of M365.

Specifically on the creation and management of project mailboxes -- that
is a very common approach that is accomplished with group mailboxes.
Many agencies settle on a naming convention for these mailboxes, and
they need administrator(s), but you should be able to find plenty of use
cases describing that in the public domain. We considered group
mailboxes -- for projects, or deparments, or other non-personal uses --
as a way to avoid storing email with institutional importance in
personal mailboxes that later get abandoned when the inevitable
retirement or resignation occurs.

If you can get your technical staff involved with users in a
conversation with your agency's Microsoft technical account team, you
will probably be able to work toward a solution. One interesting thing
is that a lot of the security and data administration underpinnings of
O/M365, from a user perspective, were designed with a heavy hand from
Microsoft's legal departments. If anyone knows the value and
challenges of lost data, it is the legal team.

Yes, you have described our setup pretty well. I do sit on a working group for technology implementation, so I do have some access to mid-level staff who can help me shape up a possible proposal. Ironically, we had originally outsourced our archive software when we moved to Outlook to meet our legal retention requirements, but that is a whole other story. So, I believe that MS is handling some of our current retention features. I just need to find a user-friendly way of getting project files to a common project repository, most likely in SP with a Teams front end that meets approval. It is not going to be an easy sell, but with some background research here, at least I will hopefully not be barking up the wrong tree.

Thanks,

--Ken