What is Office 365 eDiscovery Tool? Everything You Need to Know

  

Published By Karen Chard 

Approved By Rollins Duke

Published On May 23rd, 2025

Reading Time 7 Min Read

What is eDiscovery in Office 365?

Electronic Discovery or eDiscovery means a process where you identify, collect, and store information for legal and regulatory cases. In the context of Microsoft 365, eDiscovery is an in-built tool where organizations search, preserve, analyze and export their content from different Office 365 applications like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and MS Teams.

Just like normal eDiscovery, Office 365 eDiscovery helps the companies to efficiently manage their compliance and legal responsibilities. In this, you can easily perform keyword searches, filter your data based on metadata and export the content. So, this tool helps you to improve your data security within the Microsoft environment. eDiscovery provides you several features and functions in Microsoft 365. So, next we will see the key features of this tool.

Prominent Features of eDiscovery in Office 365

• Content Search: This is a type of eDiscovery where users do keyword searches across applications like Exchange Online, SharePoint, Mailboxes, etc. By using this, users filterise their data on the basis of date, sender/recipient, file type and many more. After searching your data you can export them for review.
• Legal Holds: To preserve the content of mailboxes and sites, eDiscovery offers In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold. It is used to prevent data tampering, deletion and legally holds your data from sending to the users or groups.
• Case Management: It is used to organize your eDiscovery tasks into the cases that are easy to manage. Here, users assign roles and permissions to different team members. In the case management, each case offers holds, searches and exports.
• Save Results: This function is used to export your data into a PST file. This is the only function that allows you to save your Office 365 data in your local machine.
• Advanced eDiscovery: Another type of eDiscovery where you can do machine learning, email threading, near-duplicate detection, and relevance scoring. There is an in-built review option to filter and tag your items. The main purpose of this is to reduce oversize data by removing duplicates and irrelevant content.
• Audit Logs and Reporting: The tool also provides you the option to track your actions during the eDiscovery process. Here, it created detailed audit trails to make sure proper transparency and maintain chain of custody.

All the above features help you to handle legal and compliance related investigations while also maintaining data integrity and security.

How eDiscovery Work?

Till now we have learned so much about the Office 365 eDiscovery tool. But now we come to the main section: how to use Microsoft 365 eDiscovery Export Tool. The process is lengthy, so we divided them into 2 proper steps, so carefully follow them.

Step 1: Assign eDiscovery Permissions to All Your Members

First provide eDiscovery related permission to your team members to add them as eDiscovery case members. But before that you must be a part of eDiscovery role group members. The role group members act as a reviewer and eDiscovery manager where you give access to members to view and access the case data. Also, you have the permissions to create and manage eDiscovery cases. To provide the permissions, follow the steps below.

1. Go to the protection.office.com page and login to your Microsoft 365 account.
2. In the Admin Center, click on the Security and Compliance option.
3. Select the Permissions and drag it to the eDiscovery manager.
4. Click on the checkbox beside the eDiscovery Manager and click the Edit button.
5. Press the + or Add button. Enter the initial of your member name, then select the member checkbox.
6. After you add the members click on the Done button.

Step 2: Search the Content and Export It

1. Go back to the Security and Compliance section and click More Resources.
2. Select the Microsoft Purview Compliance, choose Content Search and hit the New Search button.
   
3. Provide the Name & description of your search and the location you want to export.
   
4. On the Conditions section, apply different filters and provide query language, keywords, and conditions for the specific search. Click the Submit and Done button.
5. The software searches the content to track the status of the search. Go to the Search tab.
   
6. After it completes, click on Actions and Export the results.
7. Choose the options you desired and hit the Export button. The tool starts exporting your data, to track the result, go to the Export tab.
   
8. Once it completes, click on the Download button and press the copy button from the Export key.
   
9. Lastly, the eDiscovery export tool will start automatically. Paste the Export key that you copied.
10. Browse a destination path and hit the Start button.

This is how the Office 365 eDiscovery tool works. Users can use this to find important data and export them. It is very helpful, but there are many problems as well. Which we will explain later.

Issues When Using Microsoft 365 eDiscovery Tool

• The Content Search feature has basic functions. Because of the lack of advanced filtering and data analysis. It is not ideal for a large-scale process.
• If you want to get the benefits from advanced eDiscovery then you need a pro Microsoft 365 license. Which is costly for the smaller businesses.
• Users can export their results, but it only saves it in PST format. If you want your data in another format then you need to use a third party tool to convert the files.
• For large scale exports eDiscovery is not capable of. Because it is time consuming and you may hit the limitations of file size or number of items.
• Also, during the process, you may face several errors like eDiscovery PST Export Tool cannot be started, eDiscovery search failed, the PST export tool is stuck at calculating in Office 365, etc.

So, eDiscovery in Office 365 is also not as perfect as you want it to be. However, when it comes to securing your data, this tool will be very useful.

Final Words

In this article, we have explained the Office 365 eDiscovery tool. Here, we discuss core features provided by eDiscovery. Provided the steps to use the utility and introduce you to software that are complementary with the eDiscovery software. This guide is an introduction to eDiscovery for beginners. If you want to know more in detail contact our support team.