Premium eDiscovery Direct Export

This feature has me confused - so this is later than normal

First, apologies for not having this out first thing Monday morning, which is when I normally like to get these things published. I was testing this new feature that allows an eDiscovery user to directly export the results of a collection as opposed to adding it to a Review Set when things took an unexpected turn. So I didn’t quite get this ready on Sunday evening, but had to do some last edits during my lunch hour today instead.

The feature itself is pretty self-explanatory. Once you’ve run a search and have estimated results, you can choose to export the collected items instead of committing the collection to a Review Set:

Once that is selected you get a screen that looks a bit like the eDiscovery Standard screen with some of the advanced options from Premium eDiscovery thrown in:

So far, so good. The problems started when I began testing those extra options, especially the option for Cloud Attachments. I’ll get into the specific details for paid subscribers but let me leave all of you with my tried-and-true message about all things M365. Test this yourself, and keep testing it. What I found was that certain types of searches and exports would collect the cloud attachments and add them to the ZIP download, while others did not, even with the option selected. However, even when the cloud attachments were collected, they were not linked to the messages at all. You could view it as a one-step improvement over a Standard export, I suppose. It followed the link and collected the linked attachment, but did not identify it as an attachment.

I also discovered that selecting the option for Teams and Yammer Conversations created HTML files for my conversations, similar to what adding them to a review set does, while not selecting that item left them as individual MSG files instead of creating HTML files. That might make some folks, who have mourned the inability to get individual message metadata using Premium eDiscovery, happy.

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of what I found: