Records Management and Defensible Disposal with AvePoint Opus

AvePoint Opus is a records management tool for Microsoft 365. It classifies, governs, and defensibly disposes of records across SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, and connected file shares, then stores the audit evidence back in SharePoint.

TC uses Opus where Microsoft Purview alone does not go far enough: complex retention schedules, hybrid content sources, and strict audit requirements.

What Opus does

• Classify: AI-assisted classification of content against your retention schedule
• Retain: multi-stage retention workflows that native Purview labels cannot express on their own
• Dispose: defensible, reviewed disposal at the end of retention
• Prove: automated disposal certificates stored back in SharePoint as permanent audit evidence

Opus and Microsoft Purview

Purview handles retention labels and policies well. Opus adds the records management layer on top: hierarchical retention schedules, bulk disposal with review, and disposal certificates that Purview does not generate natively. The two work together. They are not an either/or.

Where Opus earns its place

• Agencies and organisations with complex or hierarchical retention schedules
• Hybrid environments with records spread across Microsoft 365 and legacy file shares
• Strict audit requirements, where you need to prove what was disposed, when, and under which schedule
• Closing the gap between Purview retention labels and a full records management programme

What a TC engagement looks like

A typical Opus engagement runs in 4 phases:

1. Scan and classify: connect Opus to the tenant and classify content against your retention schedule
2. Review: review classifications and proposed retention with records owners and business stakeholders
3. Apply: apply retention schedules across the in-scope content
4. Dispose and certify: run defensible disposal in waves with owner sign-off, generating disposal certificates for audit

Why records management matters

Most of what an organisation stores is not worth keeping. Veritas research found that around 85 percent of stored enterprise data is either dark (unclassified and unused) or redundant, obsolete, or trivial, with roughly 33 percent classified as ROT. Without a records management programme, that content accumulates indefinitely, raising storage costs, audit risk, and the noise that AI tools read from.

Why this matters for Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot reads from the same content estate. If your tenant is full of unclassified, outdated, and over-retained content, Copilot draws its answers from it. Disposing of what you no longer need to keep makes the content that remains more trustworthy.

Ongoing management

Records management is ongoing, not a one-off. Opus runs continuously against your retention schedule, so new content is classified and disposed of on time, by default.

To scope an Opus records management engagement, submit a support ticket.