Electronic Discovery or e-Discovery is the process of identifying documents which can be used as an evidence in legal cases. SharePoint Online has an e-Discovery site template, which helps to search for legitimate legal contents and place a hold on them until the legal formalities are completed. However you have to be a global administrator to place a hold on the document. The high level process involved in e-discovery is diagrammatically shown below.
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Source: TechNet
Getting Started
In SharePoint Online, the e-Discovery center is created as a site collection. e-Discovery cases are created as subsites within the site collection. From the site collection, creation page in SharePoint Online, select ‘Private Site Collection”.
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This will open up the page from where we can create site collection in SharePoint Online. Specify the below values for creating the site collection
- Title Name of the e-Discovery site collection.
- Web Site Address- It specifies the managed site path for the e-Discovery center.
- Template Selection- Select e-Discovery Center site template from the 'Enterprise' tab.
- Time Zone- Specify a time zone from the options in the time zone drop down list.
- Administrator- Specify the site collection administrator of the e-Discovery Center site collection.
- Storage Quota- Specify the size in MB that can be allocated to the e-Discovery Center site collection.
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Once the values are filled, click OK to start the provisioning of the e-Discovery Center site collection. After a few minutes, the newly created site collection will be available in the list of site collections, as shown below.
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By clicking on the URL, we can get to see the detailed information about the site collection, which was created recently.
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Enter the URL in the Browser and go to the e-Discovery center site collection. We will get a welcoming introduction message on how to use the e-Discovery Center.
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In order to create a new e-Discovery case, we can click Create new case button, which is available on the page.
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This will open up a subsite creation page and a new subsite will be created under the e-Discovery root site collection.
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Once the site is created, we can explore the entire feature set of the e-Discovery center. We can create an e-Discovery set, which will identify and preserve the required content. We can also place In-Place hold on the items such that the users can work on the documents without even knowing that a hold has been placed on it. The users can still work on the content, but a copy of the content at the time when the hold was initialized is preserved.
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We will explore the step by step process of e-Discovery and In-Place Hold in an upcoming article.
Summary
Thus, we saw how to set up e-Discovery center and create a new case sub site within the e-Discovery site collection.