When an organization has a reasonable expectation of litigation in the future, it may be required to preserve electronic communications, such as email and IMs that may be relevant to the case. As this can be a very broad requirement, organizations may need to implement information protection policies from the start. ExchangeOnline provides a number of features that enable you to control how information is stored, managed, and transmitted within the organization.
eDiscovery and in-place hold provide a mechanism to search mailboxes for specific words, such as “merger” and “Adatum”, and then specify what happens to the information gathered. Compliance officials and data security managers can then review this information in case of future litigation. The key point here is that in-place hold preserves information even if users delete it, and that eDiscovery
makes that information available to users with the correct role-based access control rights.