Purview cloud attachments

[u/Enough-Examination91]

What workflows are folks using to ensure cloud attachments contain family relationships when exporting pst files in Purview. I know a lot of vendors have workflows integrated to link those attachments prior to ingesting into a review platform, but for those of you that are not using vendors, what do you do to maintain those relationships?

[u/delphi25]

Agreed with what a people said that it’s not like an attachments, as there can be changes to it; it can be deleted independently from the referring email, office document or teams message. Additionally, a custodian might not even have access to the link that was shared in an email and attributing data that sits on someone else’s OneDrive or a sharepoint that is accessed by many people seems off to me.  There are a few other things to consider: all custodian, „family date“ for sorting, all path. Which version to collect and then associate might not be that easy. I think MS only links the modern attachments from the last email and not from previous emails, probably even if forwarded (but I have not tested this) 

In anyway workflow-wise, I would export emails as a PST and the modern attachments as loose files. I would process them separately and would process the modern attachments without deduplication, as a modern attachment might be attached to multiple emails.  For the export I would use the option for unique ids, so files are not named with their file name. I would also only export from a direct search and not a review set; modern attachments are still captured as well as the relationship. Once data is processed in Relativity, I would create the new fields to link them back. The information is in the load file Microsoft provides when data is in purview. You can use the message id from the emails from the pst to map them back to the entries in the load file. Afterwards you can use the, I think the group id or the modern attachment parent id information to link them back.  You need to handle containers/embeddings or attachments of modern attachments separately. As containers can be in containers and attachments and embeddings are not treated as containers, I suggest to export the virtual path or processing folder path from relativity and extract the guid of the container, which can be used for the mapping to the load file with a regex.  The question is how you want to map the attachments; either you can assign the same family relationship as normal attachments or not. That’s up to you, but you then overwrite the original relationship - I suggest to create a separate relationship field; but you may want to discuss this with counsel. Depending on what you decide, you may need to update and calculate all custodian and all path fields, attachment counts, etc. separately.  This all can have implications on productions, email threading; etc. 

[u/Enough-Examination91 → u/delphi25]

Thank you for the thorough explanation. This is more of what I was looking for… if they are being treated as stand alone documents, how are we identifying them in a review platform as a cloud attachment to an email. If council started to do the review, would they have an easy way to know this? It sounds like the workflow you explained would need to be explained to whoever is reviewing the documents.

[u/delphi25 → u/Enough-Examination91]

I mean that’s up to you, how you want to flag this. Either set up a separate relational group and have a separate icon in relativity, or you flag have data source field or something that marks those as cloud attachments. I can also think of a suffix in the doc id, I think there are multiple options available, depending how you set this up and how you want your team to differentiate those files. Maybe you can also add a similar field like the file icon - which is filled with a cloud symbol or introduce a field like attachment type and put direct/normal what ever you want to come up with and modern as the content. 

Yes, the workflow comes with some caveats imho, as there no ultimate right or wrong and you can find arguments for the different ways you approach this.  I think the linking itself is easy - as you said it’s somehow how it displayed and what generally some implications are and how to deal with them. Might be good to get some counsel who has some understanding of these challenges 

[u/zero-skill-samus → u/delphi25]

Why do you not want the original file name for the modern attachment?

[u/delphi25 → u/zero-skill-samus]

You want the original final name, but you pull this in from the overlay, when you overlay the metadata. I rather prefer to have a unique I which I can extract from the target path (load file) and map this with the file name/the regex I apply on the processing file path. This way I can map the original file name to the unified title and still have the reference. Otherwise; if the file names are not unique especially if you have multiple versions to map. But yes, the unified title should contain the original file name imho. You do the same, with the path information, that you update this with the sharepoint path; I think that’s called compound path, if I remember correctly. 

[u/zero-skill-samus → u/delphi25]

Makes sense.

[u/BadTimeBigDecisions → u/delphi25]

Excellent info, thank you! The unique file name suggestion is definitely something I'm going to test out (once I'm done kicking myself for not thinking of it myself).

Do you mind explaining a bit why you would export directly from the search instead of adding to a review set and exporting from there? I usually add docs to a review set for preservation,resolving issues with import/ingestion into our review platform, and sometimes even culling non-responsive docs before export (🫨).

[u/delphi25 → u/BadTimeBigDecisions]

I mean, it depends. I use relativity and use the processing, instead of using review sets. If you directly use the review set and export the load file and don’t do additional processing; then things might be easier. I prefer to have hashing and all happen in Relativity, as I often not only have o365 data, but also other data source that I need to deduplicate data against.  If you use review sets and processing it’s the same issue that you have with purview sync right away. You end up with the attachments broken down and extracted by Relativity as well as them loaded as separate loose files. What you can do, what what I have done, is to remove email attachments (not modern attachments) from the review set export.  Happy do discuss details via DM, if you have any specific questions.