MS-102 Manage compliance by using Microsoft Purview Practice Question
An organization is involved in litigation and needs to search for all communications containing a specific keyword across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. The results must be preserved as evidence without allowing deletion. Which Microsoft Purview solution should the compliance officer use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse eDiscovery (Premium) with Retention Labels or Communication Compliance because all three involve content management, but only eDiscovery (Premium) provides the legal hold and cross-workload search capabilities required for litigation evidence preservation.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
eDiscovery (Premium)
eDiscovery (Premium) is the correct solution because it provides end-to-end workflow for identifying, preserving, collecting, reviewing, and exporting content across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. It supports legal hold to preserve data in-place, preventing deletion or alteration, and can search all communications for specific keywords using advanced query capabilities.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Data Loss Prevention
Why it's wrong here
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a policy engine that inspects content for sensitive information types such as credit card numbers or PII and enforces actions like blocking or warning before transmission. It does not offer a unified search and discovery experience across Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams, nor can it place an immutable legal hold on custodial content. While DLP might prevent future exfiltration, it cannot locate or preserve historical records with the defensibility required for litigation.
- ✓
eDiscovery (Premium)
Why this is correct
eDiscovery (Premium) is the Microsoft 365 workload designed for legal discovery: it uses a single search index across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams, allowing keywords, conditional operators, and custodian-based collection. It can place a legal hold on matched content, making it immutable and preserving all versions and metadata until released. Review sets then provide advanced analytics, redaction, tagging, and export for litigation workflows, so it directly answers the need to search and preserve.
- ✗
Communication Compliance
Why it's wrong here
Communication Compliance is focused on monitoring internal and external communications for inappropriate behavior such as harassment, threats, or regulatory policy violations using trainable classifiers and machine-learning models. It generates alerts and remediation tasks rather than providing comprehensive litigation discovery; it does not index all content workloads for a broad keyword search, cannot create a custodian-based legal hold across the entire tenant, and lacks the review set and export functions needed for a court case. Its purpose is risk and conduct monitoring, not evidence preservation.
- ✗
Retention Labels
Why it's wrong here
Retention labels are information-governance controls that apply retention or deletion behavior to individual items based on manual user action or automated auto-labeling rules. They can prevent permanent deletion by retaining content for a configured period, but they do not provide a search interface to locate all items relevant to litigation, cannot target multiple workload data sources for a single discovery query, and do not support custodian-specific holds with release workflows. A label only defines lifecycle timing; it gives no capability to collect, review, or produce evidence for a legal case.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Teams Compliance: Recording and Archiving
Key term
SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based collaboration platform from Microsoft that lets teams create, store, organize, and share content securely from anywhere.
Key term
Exchange Online
Exchange Online is Microsoft's cloud-based email, calendar, and contact hosting service that is part of the Microsoft 365 suite, allowing organizations to manage corporate messaging without maintaining their own mail servers.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This MS-102 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the MS-102 exam.