Journal
The schedule was careful. Tax records at seven years, board minutes at ten, routine correspondence at three. Labels had been created to match. The document management application, in this case SharePoint Online with Purview labels, was treated as the place those rules would run.
When we sampled libraries used by finance and company secretarial, most files had no label. Auto-apply policies pointed at a department that had been renamed. Default labels were switched off on the busiest sites because they interrupted a scanning contractor. Users could upload without choosing anything.
Disposal jobs had never run. Nothing was overdue in the legal sense yet, because the company was young enough that seven years had not arrived. The risk was still real: without labels, the later disposal would be a manual hunt, and a hold would have to be placed by folder guesswork.
The fix was not a new product. It was restoring default labels on the record libraries, rebuilding auto-apply against the current Azure AD groups, and accepting that the scanning contractor needed a drop library that is not the official store. The official store then received a nightly copy with the label applied.
If you only inspect the Purview catalogue, the system looks complete. An application audit has to open the libraries people actually use.