Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Reviews

Our primary use case for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is related to eDiscovery cases internally. If someone is placed on litigation hold and we need to produce documents that may be related to a case, that's typically the use case.

This solution makes it much quicker for us on the support side to produce the materials because they're all in one place. Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented Purview now take just 30 minutes.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms.

It is critical for Purview to be able to connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From a support perspective, I can do things while I'm eating lunch or something else. It's more dynamic and responsive. I think everybody appreciates it. We're not tied to one device. Purview's multi-cloud capabilities are also essential for the same reasons. Keeping everything under one umbrella further increases the time savings. 

Purview accounts for critical regulations from around the world. This is crucial because we hold ourselves accountable to standards and need to align with them. Working at a law firm, we have clients who dictate to us what standards they expect. The visibility is excellent. As we move more things into the cloud, more opportunities exist to put everything under one umbrella. 

I would suggest adding more platforms. Currently, it's compatible with OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange. Adding more features, as Microsoft continues to expand their cloud offerings, would be beneficial. Exploring options like Azure Files might be an avenue for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery for probably five years.

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is highly reliable. I cannot think of a time where there was an outage that impacted anything in this regard.

There has never been any sort of friction as we've introduced more elements into the cloud. It scales with us seamlessly.

I haven't had to use customer service and support, which is good.

Positive

Previously, I used Varonis to search across unstructured datasets and the native tools in Exchange for email. With Purview, you don't need to switch between solutions. We want to consolidate whenever possible to reduce the line items on the budget and because you get more value out of highly integrated solutions. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It's built into the platforms I use, and it was ready to roll out of the box.

It's hard to quantify the ROI in a dollar amount, but we realize value by doing more tasks in less time than we did before. Previously, we had to say "no" to some asks. While it didn't put litigation on hold, we saw some scenarios where someone accidentally deleted something. Purview allows us to search for that. There are other less tangible results, like when IT sends out surveys for people to rate employee satisfaction with us as a team. 

We go through CDW for all of our acquisitions, and they are very easy to work with. With CSP or MCE-style agreements with Microsoft, the process is streamlined since we have reps from both Microsoft and CDW working together.

I did not consider any other vendors before choosing Microsoft Purview eDiscovery. There was a lot of momentum toward Azure, making the decision straightforward.

I rate Microsoft Purview eDiscovery a nine out of ten. I leave a point for the opportunities for additional integrations.

We primarily use Purview eDiscovery for litigation requests.

Purview eDiscovery has made it significantly easier to handle rare litigation requests. When we get the litigation request to pull the information that is being requested by our counsel, we do not have to be the ones to present it. The legal team can independently access and review information requested by counsel. They can get it, understand it, look at it, and tell us what they need. It has made that very easy for them.

It can connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices, and data in other SaaS apps. This would be important for my legal team. For me, what is important is that it is secure and limited to just the corporate data that is involved with those devices, depending on how it is enrolled.

It delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. It is important for us because we do have an AWS footprint.

It was built taking into account critical regulations from around the world. We deal with a number of different compliance requirements. Being able to stay compliant with those regulations is definitely important.

It has affected the visibility we have into our estate. It definitely shows that a lot of my salespeople are not doing things the way they are supposed to. It has increased the workload a little bit, but it has also saved us money and the risk of not being in compliance.

It enables us to show our compliance in real-time. We have all the various policies turned on. We can do that quickly with a checkbox and screenshot. It has definitely sped that up.

The speed of it is valuable. I am able to search even 10,000 mailboxes for specific content. 

It helps search and accommodate the often limited information provided by users regarding what they need. It provides a solid starting point, and then we are able to refine the data from there. That has been very helpful because we do not always get enough information from our users to know what to look for. For example, a user is missing an email from x date but does not know anything else. In such a case, I give them a list of emails to look at so that they can tell me what they are missing. It is not a lack of the tool. It is more of a lack of the user providing info.

It has been one of the most solid tools I have worked with. However, Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives. 

I have been using Purview eDiscovery for at least eight years, with the last three being at my current company.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable, fitting well with our enterprise needs.

We have not had to submit any support requests.

Neutral

We did not use any other solutions as Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is a part of our licensing agreement.

Most of the policies are applied worldwide. It took us a little bit to ramp it up. It does take some time to tweak and tune policies, but it is worth it.

We used a reseller due to ESIF funding on our recent enterprise agreement, and their support was excellent. They were extremely helpful.

We have seen a 100% return on investment. Since enabling the features, the tool has uncovered previously unknown compliance risks. The trainable classifiers need a little bit of tuning, but we block a lot of things. Seeing what people are attempting to do and circumvent our systems has definitely been eye-opening for a number of our teammates.

With the full bundle, pricing is not a significant concern. As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile.

I would rate Purview eDiscovery a nine out of ten.

I sometimes use it for legal holds or to find lost items, and to determine what is going on. However, most of the time, my use case is legal-related.

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery has saved me personally a lot of time because I can query it, and it touches everything we have as a full Microsoft shop. If I had to find things by hand, it would probably be a day's work, but I can find it in 10 minutes using Purview. I wouldn't want to do it the other way. It retrieves all the relevant results I need. This helps the company because it helps us ensure we have accurate information when there are legal disputes.

The ability to query everything that's in Microsoft and send links or add people, like managers, to review the documents is valuable. It's easy as I don't have to download and email anything. I just add them as a reviewer, and they can access it from there. 

Purview's inclusion of critical regulations is essential. Lawyers will ask how we gathered information. With Purview, we can guarantee that we've followed the regulations. The visibility into what's happening and who has access is great for legal matters and saves us a lot of time.

The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be beneficial. Copilot is expected to add such functionality in the future.

I've been using eDiscovery since before it was part of Purview for seven or eight years.

We've never had an issue with it being down or not working. For us, it has been one hundred percent reliable.

We haven't needed to grow it or make changes since its setup and it continues to function efficiently.

I haven't had to reach out to technical support for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery. However, based on experience with their other services, Microsoft usually responds in a reasonable time.

Positive

Years ago, at a different employer, we used another solution whose name I cannot recall. It was an outdated piece of software that didn't perform well, which led to switching to Purview. Purview stood out because it was easier and faster to use.

The initial setup was very easy. It took an hour or two to get it set up the way we wanted, and since then, we haven't had to do much to maintain it.

We conducted the deployment in-house without using an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

The ease of accessing necessary information promptly is the biggest return on investment. Court dates often do not accommodate delays, so having fast and accurate information is essential.

The setup process was very straightforward. We acquired pricing through our reseller in NASDAQ, eliminating the need to search for prices ourselves.

We did not evaluate any other solutions before choosing Purview.

I would rate Microsoft Purview eDiscovery eight out of 10. There is a learning curve when using the tool, but with enhancements like Copilot, it could potentially earn a ten in the future.

We are using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery for our legal department to place legal holds whenever there's any type of litigation against our company.

Before using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, we manually placed our legal holds. This tool allows us to automate the process, allowing users in our legal department to place holds without needing IT involvement. The visibility and reporting are way better than what we had before because it was all manual. Before, all we could do was email someone and have them pull all the content. It significantly reduces the amount of time to generate a legal hold.

The most valuable features are automatic content logging tagging. Performing these tasks manually would be impossible. Since most of our data is already in Microsoft, it's convenient to run it through this tool.

Right now, Purview covers email, SharePoint, and OneDrive. We don't allow Android on our network. It's iOS only. I have a ton of content and other systems that I'm not able to place on legal hold right now because it's not in those three ecosystems.

Purview's inclusion of global regulations is critical because we're heavily regulated by FERC, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the SEC. 

The sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users. We still need all the backend stuff. We have to use Graph API to interface with everything and create custom interfaces on the front end to make it easier for the end users, which is costly. The reporting, sorting, and filtering capabilities that other products have aren't available natively in Purview.  

We have been using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery for about a year.

I've never had a problem with the stability of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery.

So far, it works fast and efficiently, and I hope it continues that way as more features are added.

I haven't had to engage with Purview technical support. Support varies by department. Some inquiries are answered on the same day, while others take weeks.

Positive

Previously, we used manual processes. We switched because we're a Microsoft shop, and it made sense.

The initial setup was straightforward, mostly just about activating the necessary features.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for deployment. I usually handle things as I have been working with Microsoft for 20 years.

The return on investment is saving the equivalent of one or two full-time IT department employees and a few hours per week for legal staff.

The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently. While the licensing for Purview is not as tricky as other Microsoft products, navigating licenses since the shift to E3 and E5 plans has been a task, as individual licenses must now be purchased separately.

We evaluated a solution from OpenText, which uses Purview in the backend, and another vendor brought in by Ernst and Young, but I cannot recall the name.

I would rate Microsoft Purview eDiscovery seven out of 10. We need better reporting and a more user-friendly interface for creating queries.

We use Microsoft Purview eDiscovery for searching historical data during legal cases. It helps us capture information from Outlook or Teams if a past employee leaves and their information is needed later.

Purview helps us find the information we need on time. It has increased visibility into our estate and helped us have the data readily available when we need it. 

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is the content search. We can use it to find the data we need by searching for keywords, phrases, or the sender or recipient. It helps us gather information from current employees or ones who have left the company.

Purview can connect to iOS, Mac, Android, and SaaS apps, which is critical for capturing SMS and MMS text message data. That's often needed. It's also helpful if we need to do a content search from a mobile device. 

We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders. It would be beneficial to have more options available for E3 customers. Enhanced Teams functionalities and better capture of text message data, both SMS and MMS, would also be improvements.

We have been using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery primarily for the past two or three years.

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is pretty stable for the current search functionalities that we use.

With the E3 licensing, I would rate the scalability of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery as a six because it lacks certain critical search functionalities.

I would rate Microsoft Purview eDiscovery's customer service and technical support a ten. They were readily available when needed.

Positive

We also use third-party companies for quicker email content searches. Jatheon provides better search functionality with our E3 licensing compared to Microsoft Purview.

We worked with Microsoft as an integrator for implementing Microsoft Purview eDiscovery.

Our legal team benefits from using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery.

The costs associated with E5 licensing are currently expensive for us, so we use the E3 license, which comes with fewer features and functionalities.

We currently use both Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and Jatheon since the latter offers better search functionalities.

I would give Microsoft Purview eDiscovery a rating of six out of 10 due to missing critical search functionalities that require an E5 license or third-party solutions.

I was learning the product and using it to help others develop eDiscovery workflows through 365 data. I taught them how to collect data from Teams and other Microsoft products. 

One of our primary use cases was related to the pandemic. Many companies rolled out Teams quickly and had to play catch-up on various information governance issues, such as where Teams data resides and how to collect it. I spent a lot of time testing in a live environment, teaching people how things work, and doing other tasks to help them. 

I think eDiscovery Premium has made dealing with data from Teams much more accessible than any other platform. It has improved visibility by enabling us to pull things into a review set. Reviewing the metadata has helped us understand where things sit, whether in a mailbox or a SharePoint site. It shows us where the data is located and how it fits together.

It has been tremendously helpful to have a tool in my 365 environment and allows me to poke around to see where things are. I can create data that it doesn't see. The ability to test that quickly has been valuable. 

I think eDiscovery helped my client save time and money. You can run searches and get a feel for what is in the environment. The ability to use some of the tools with Teams data helps them. The alternative is to grab somebody's mailbox and send it to a vendor, who will process it and charge you. So having sort of an almost an early case assessment early data assessment tool that you can use again sits right there in your environment that gives you a feel for what's out there.

Purview lets me partially check compliance in real-time. They've updated some of the reporting, so it's getting better. I think one of the complaints for a long time was a lack of reporting. You could run a search and target a collection based on that search. The number of items that got pulled in as part of your collection wouldn't necessarily equal the number of search hits. There wasn't a lot of reporting to explain that. There were reasons for it. When you understand how the process works, it makes sense why it doesn't add up. However, it would be confusing how it went from 400 search hits to 600 items collected. 

I understood all the ways that could happen in theory, but I don't have any reporting that showed me that. They've started implementing reports like that, so it is improving in those areas. That was something I often heard on the compliance side. People complained they couldn't show their work because it was all Microsoft's secret sauce. Everything happened in the background, and you couldn't get a report on it. 

Purview's data protection features are vital. With all the changes in data protection and privacy laws, Microsoft must provide a way for people to keep their data safe while being able to access it when needed. Microsoft 365 is a vast platform. You have data everywhere and connections to outside resources hosted on AWS and other non-Microsoft platforms. It's crucial to have the ability to keep all your data safe in one place. That's the dream.

It's crucial to be able to grab information from whatever's connected to that, whether it's an iOS, Android, or other endpoint. At the same time, when I'm doing forensic collection from those devices using Celebrate or some other tool, can I pull that information into my eDiscovery platform?

I like the Data Connector platform, which supports ingestion from other Microsoft data sources. It's a little confusing, though, because Microsoft defaults to throwing everything into Exchange. You're putting so much stuff into the mailbox, but Exchange is the place where I know I can get it. When you have a connector or something like Slack, it just pulls those messages straight into the mailbox. As a new eDiscovery user, I'm not concerned about how to go to these platforms and get this information. I only need to worry about the mailbox. 

Native integration across Dynamics and 365 is crucial. Some things live in Azure databases that the discovery tools can't collect. That's an issue for a lot of people I work with. Let's say I've got this Azure database storing many data, but my eDiscovery tool can't read from it. Now I need to figure out how to get that data and pull it into my discovery tool. That is one area where Microsoft has made much progress over the last three years. More things are reachable, but accessing stuff in Azure is still a challenge.

One of the biggest challenges is that regulations vary depending on your location. I don't envy Microsoft figuring that out, but it's critical. In the discovery world, there are data privacy protections and laws about the geolocation of data, etc. Those are things we have to pay attention to. You can't fudge that because those are legal requirements. It's crucial to have a discovery tool that can work with that. 

I see two significant challenges with many of my clients. One is that there are some functionality gaps compared to specialized tools in the legal industry, like a legal hold tool or a document review tool. They have features that Purview eDiscovery lacks. Those gaps create a situation where I almost have to do things twice. I need to collect all my data in eDiscovery and ship it to another platform to complete the review.

For example, you can't date stamp documents. I have to put them in another tool to do that. It has legal hold notifications and various decent features, but other tools have more functionality. Those are some minor challenges and gaps, but I wouldn't want to solve the larger issues myself. 

The other problem is that it's changing all the time. Microsoft has an excellent platform, and they're constantly updating 365. It creates an issue for eDiscovery users when Microsoft makes those changes behind the scenes, and you're unaware. I've experienced this. We were getting ready to have a training session with a customer, and the interface differed when we logged in the next day.  

It's a general issue with SaaS and cloud-native products, not just Microsoft. With an on-prem solution, I can see that I'm at version 10.0.1, and here are all the new features in the release notes. However, in 365, I'm wherever Microsoft tells me I am, and I never know when new features will hit. I can't stop them from being implemented. 

I wake up one day to see that everything has changed, and now I need to figure out how it will impact my workflow. It might not even be a change to an eDiscovery feature. You'd be talking about something like loops or any new product. How do I collect this? How does it work with eDiscovery? It's almost a full-time job keeping track of these changes. 

I have used Purview for three years.

Purview eDiscovery is mostly stable. Sometimes functions take longer than expected, or the performance is sluggish. It's a cloud environment, so I don't know what's happening behind the scenes. Microsoft is working on creating some tools that let me see what other jobs are running on the tenant, so I can see that my job is running slowly because there are three ahead of it.

You typically can't see that. It's a mystery why it's running slow. That will help because things often seem unstable or slow for no reason, but there are functions happening that you can't see. 

I rate Microsoft's support a seven out of ten. They were helpful. I didn't like the solution to the particular issue I contacted them about, but they helped. I was making some assumptions on how a search would work based on other tools that that's not the way it was built. I expected some results from the search, I didn't get them. I wasn't necessarily happy with the answer, but they were good at getting back to me.

Neutral

Before eDiscovery, I used various tools like Relativity to review and produce data. I'm familiar with a lot of those document review solutions and some collection tools used to grab data out of the system and send it for processing. 

I wasn't involved in the deployment. Microsoft handles all the maintenance, which is the benefit of a cloud-based platform. You need to keep track of the changes, but I wouldn't call that maintenance per se.

A lot of my clients see a return in terms of just the tools that they have to review their data. If you're only on an E3 license, you get certain compliance tools but not others. The new eDiscovery Professional Edition allows some things a standard eDiscovery can't do. My return on investment is the ability to collect, review, and clean Teams data before I send it out.

When I share a file in Teams, it doesn't live in my Exchange mailbox. It lives somewhere else, so it's helpful to have a tool that says, "There's a link here. Let me grab that document for you." If I'm an E3 legacy, I have to figure out where those documents are. It's a huge headache to go out and collect them. Having a tool saves so much time. When you're dealing with a vendor that's paying you for processing and hosting per gigabyte, it's always cheaper to send less data.

A few things are tricky with the E5 licensing. If your company is a heavy Teams user, eDiscovery Premium offers some massive advantages in terms of collecting your Teams data that you don't get with the standard edition. That's the argument we made for charging people extra. 

It has been nice, and the company made a good business decision. I'm not angry about it. However, as they advance the platform, you won't be able to get certain features with an E3 license, which will make it harder on the compliance front.

I rate Microsoft Purview eDiscovery a six out of ten. It still has some gaps. My advice is to prepare for updates and keep track of the roadmap. Check the messages you get from Microsoft so that you're aware when features change. You should also test the solution first to ensure it does what you think it will do. There are things with Teams data, like meeting recordings, that you need to see in practice. You need to verify that they are where you think they are when you target a search. 

Our company has been transforming since last year. Due to this, there have been numerous changes in the workforce, with employees joining and moving out. This solution helps collect data from SharePoint and email exchanges. It enables me to provide access to users for specific emails. Additionally, the solution allows you to search through contacts and other content.

The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and they didn't disclose it. Thanks to the product, it's easy for me to search and find out what communication a specific user has done, whether it's from SharePoint or any other platform. With Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, we can easily retrieve and restore this data.

The tool's search options and data connectivity are good. Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is valuable for collecting information. It makes it easier for us to provide information when a user is looking for specific data from another user. For instance, it's very convenient if a user needs data from their email but doesn't want to navigate through ten years of logs (since we've migrated everything to Office 365). The old emails and data in SharePoint are easily searchable. So, I can quickly go there, retrieve the necessary information, such as a PSD card or a data file, and grant access to the users.

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery should be cheaper. 

I have been working with the product for six months. 

Microsoft's support is always good. When I create a ticket, they respond within one hour. 

Positive

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comes as part of Microsoft 365 licenses. 

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery helps us to assign roles and information to users. 

Microsoft is a global solution, especially when discussing Office 365 and everything associated. Since it's a global market, communication happens worldwide. Considering this, it's crucial to be mindful of the regulations in each part of the world. Various policies like GDPR come into play. It's really important to look into the specific regulations of each region and align our policies, solutions, and services accordingly.

Nowadays, everyone is using Microsoft 365. Keeping track of every user's activity without a centralized solution is challenging. A centralized management system helps us monitor and trace all organizational activities. This is essential for managing integration and ensuring the competency of the company.

The solution has significantly reduced the time to address an inside threat or time to action. It's been effective, and I would rate it a hundred percent. I don't have to spend any additional time. It's an automatic feature. I click, and it happens automatically. 

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery has also saved money. We can invest our time in other tasks. 

I rate it an eight out of ten. 

I used it for eDiscovery of electronically stored information in Microsoft 365. I craft searches, KQL queries, for litigation cases. It can be used for placing litigation holds, culling data, and even analytics.

The machine learning wasn't half bad. I really like that part. I thought it was novel. It pretty much automated it, once you trained the model.

And something that helps, internationally, is that Purview takes into account regulations around the world so that you can adhere to those regulations. That's a plus for an international enterprise.

It's an alright tool but it has its shortfalls. The tagging is not really all that great. We tried to leverage it in places, but others felt a third-party vendor was better suited for it.

Purview eDiscovery works, but it's not entirely perfect. There were times when search results would get hung up or error codes would be presented and we'd have to contact Microsoft to get that sorted out. And sometimes, searches take a long time, so the speed could be improved.

I used it last year. Prior to that, it was called Security Compliance Center and I used that for almost two years.

The stability has improved, compared to my experience with SCC.

There is some scalability to leverage from the solution.

We used OpenText EnCase eDiscovery, but it was more locally based. It wasn't cloud-based. It was the same with Nuix, although we never got around to implementing it.

I wasn't involved with the pricing side, but I heard it's pretty expensive for the licensing. In the positions that I've had through contracting over the years, I've heard talk of it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors.

There are better products out there. I have heard good things about kCura Relativity.

Purview's data connector platform for non-Microsoft data-source ingestion is not too bad. It's a WYSIWYG and has a nice UI, but not the greatest. You can bring in TSPs and other things from other sources if you need to. I haven't had a case where that has been necessary but I have heard of other places that are in need of it. However, there are other platforms, like Nuix, that can do it.

The machine learning, if it's leveraged properly, could positively affect the solution's speed, but refining the searches seems to be more effective than taking the time to train models to be more accurate.

It offers a little bit of everything, but it's not really specialized. It's just another suite of tools for a particular task, in this case, for ediscovery for litigation. 

Having a grasp of searching helps, including the Keyword Query Language. It's a bit finicky and there are some limitations to what you can do with Purview. I would advise you to read Microsoft's website on it. They have a pretty good Wiki for it.